Health News
2006-03-25
Ohio antigay
group launches campaign against AIDS organizations
Antigay group
files for access to thousands of documents about HIV
prevention work.
Mission America,
a Columbus, Ohio–based conservative group with strong
ties to the antigay group Concerned Women of America, has
filed a large Freedom of Information Act request for
tens of thousands of documents about the
state’s AIDS service organizations, reports Gay
People’s Chronicle. Gay activists say the
request was made to both intimidate organizations conducting
HIV prevention work in the gay community as well as to
put political pressure on lawmakers to stop funding
AIDS programs targeting gay men.
Concerned Women
of America, which teaches that “finding homosexuality
repulsive is a natural human instinct,” opposes any
publicly funded programs that in any way condone or
support homosexuality, including HIV prevention
instruction, reports the Chronicle.
“The
millions of dollars spend on pointless education about
condoms and safe sex don’t seem to change the
behaviors of most homosexuals,” Mission America
founder Linda Harvey says on the organization’s Web
site. Her organization’s “Choice 4
Truth” program claims that gay organizations
began exploiting the AIDS crisis in the 1980s—and
continue to exploit it today—as a way to gain
local, state, and federal funding to “promote the
homosexual cause.”
Harvey is seeking
state health department records from 2000 to 2005 about
funding to AIDS service organizations, copies of all HIV
prevention materials released by AIDS organizations,
lobbying materials, and funding information about
lobbying efforts on behalf of AIDS groups as well as
state data on AIDS deaths by mode of transmission, numbers
of new infections, and modes of transmission for new
infections.
Earl Pike,
executive director of the AIDS Taskforce of Greater
Cleveland, suspects that a larger antigay conservative
group, possibly Concerned Women of America, may be
behind Harvey’s crusade against HIV prevention
work in Ohio. “Your FOI request…evidences an
advanced knowledge of HIV/AIDS that I can find nowhere
else in the writings on your Web site,” Pike
wrote in a letter to Harvey that accompanied more than 1,500
pages of documents about the organization, according
to the Chronicle. “It is reasonable to suppose
that you had some assistance in drafting this request.
My question, then, is this: Who might you or Mission
America have worked with to prepare and submit the
request?”
Pike said in a
March 22 press conference that he submitted the documents
to Harvey to show his agency’s support of open access
to public information and to highlight the
transparency of his and other AIDS organizations in
the state. He also said that no matter what the
paperwork may show, he expects Harvey and Mission America
will find any HIV prevention program that teaches
anything other than abstinence to be questionable. The
right-wing group will work to end public funding of
such programs as condom instruction and distribution as well
as those that conduct outreach to gay men in
bathhouses and sex clubs, he says. (The
Advocate)
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