Confused strategy leads to passage of Prop 96

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SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 1988 3 activists and lesbian and gay-rights supporters blocked intersections in San Francisco and West Hollywood as the election results became known on Nov. 8. The protests were sparked by the passage of California state ballot Proposition 96. A second measure purporting to deal with the AIDS crisis, Proposition 102, was defeated.

Prop 96, reinforcing the false fear that AIDS can be transmitted by casual contact, will allow the police to force people in their custody to take an AIDS test if it's even remotely possible that they coughed or sneezed at a cop.

Prop 102 would have banned anonymous AIDS testing and destroyed confidentiality by requiring public reporting of anyone who tested positive for exposure to the HIV virus. The names of HIV carriers would have been made available to state health authorities but could also have been turned over to employers and insurance companies.

Both ballot propositions, while purporting to address the AIDS crisis, in fact threatened the minimal fight against AIDS that has been mounted by the government and the corporations.

These ballot propositions were opposed almost unanimously by the healthcare profession, including the Calif. Medical Assoc; Calif. Nurses Assoc.; Health Officers Assoc. of Calif.; Dr. Marcus Conant, chairman, Health Services Task Force on AIDS; Dr. Paul Volberding, Head of AIDS Programs, San Francisco General Hospital; and U.S. Surgeon General Everett Koop.

The sponsors and backers of the two measures were not the slightest bit concerned with healthcare and the AIDS epidemic. Their objective was to fuel antigay homophobia by making gays a scapegoat for the disease.

The most prominent among them, people like Lyndon LaRouche and William Dannemeyer, are widely known for their attacks on the gay community. In 1986, California voters soundly rejected the LaRouche-sponsored Prop 64, which called for quarantining all AIDS victims.

Similarly, in this election the majority of Californians rejected the idiocies and pseudomedical superstitions of Prop 102, but Prop 96 passed because of the false belief that it was a victims' rights measure—the victims, in this case, being the cops.

Whereas grassroots community activists had fought to defeat both propositions, state and local leaders in the lesbian and gay rights movement, who are tied to the Democratic Party, moved to separate the ballot measures and concede the defeat of Prop 96 even before the campaign began. They argued that opposing Prop 96 could, in fact, lead to the passage of Prop 102.

The main newspapers in the gay community also took too long to attack Prop 96 while they immediately denounced Prop 102.

This flawed and insufficient leadership, which takes up only half the battle, must be surmounted if the fight for gay rights is going to advance against antigay bigotry. Those leaders who tell us to keep quiet so we can get our politically closeted "friends" elected must be replaced.

It is possible today to mobilize large LOCK DANNEMER FEAR HATRED 96/102=BAD MEDICINE DON'T LET THEM PLAY POLITICS WITH YOUR HEALTHI numbers of AIDS activists and their allies in other social protest movements around the demands of "No forced AIDS testing" and "Full AIDS care and funding now!"