DENYING THE OBVIOUS :

AIDS Talk Costs Job : Ahern Asked To Leave Rowland's Office (CARRIE BUDOFF, June 7, 2002 , Hartford Courant)

Nancy Ahern, a New Haven alderwoman, abruptly resigned Thursday from her job as a constituent service aide in Gov. John G. Rowland's office after allegedly making what AIDS activists characterized as inappropriate comments about the spread of the disease.

Rowland's chief of staff, Dean Pagani, called Fred Hammond, executive director of the Interfaith AIDS Ministry of Greater Danbury, to apologize for the comments Ahern apparently made to Hammond during a phone conversation a day earlier.

It was during that phone call that Ahern blamed the spread of AIDS in Connecticut on minority men and homosexuals, Hammond said. She also said prevention programs are ineffective and would be eliminated, he said. Ahern was returning a call that Hammond's group made to Rowland's office regarding funding for AIDS prevention programs. [...]

"I am very happy she is no longer there so her views won't be affecting other people any longer," Hammond said. But what he would really like to see is more money put into AIDS prevention programs, Hammond said.

The failure of the Federal government to profile young male Arab students may have cost 3000 lives on September 11th. The failure to profile homosexual men and target efforts to prevent the spread of AIDs at the gay community may have cost tens, even hundreds, of thousands of lives. To take only the most obvious example, C. Everett Koop became a liberal icon telling gay men to go ahead and have sex as long as they used a condom, despite the notoriously higher failure rate for condoms during anal sex. this misinformation was the result of trying to treat heterosexuals and homosexuals identically, rather than focussing on the at risk group.

But here we are twenty years into the gay men's health crisis and you can still lose your job for stating the obvious? And we wonder why government bureaucrats walk around on eggshells when it comes to special interest and minority groups...

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 9, 2002 6:20 AM