ABSTRACT
Something has gone terribly wrong with the way we think about AIDS and monstrously wrong with the way information about this disease is conveyed to the public. Listening to Sunday morning TV talk shows or reading newspaper stories, one might come to believe that AIDS is somehow a political problem, to be solved by the outcome of furious debates between moralists on the extreme right and their counterparts on the left. Conservative columnist and publicist Pat Buchanan and others instruct the world that AIDS is essentially a small, limited problem, politically exaggerated by the liberals or by researchers looking for grants. It is made to seem an exclusively moral matter, easily solved by correcting the unnatural behavior of a relative handful of our citizens who make up the gay community (which is already, it is claimed, well on the way to mending its ways through self-education and discipline) and the intravenous drug abusers—groups that may eventually self-destruct through intransigence (all the better for the rest of us) and that have done nothing to deserve our concern or compassion. At another extreme, not necessarily left nor liberal, but political nonetheless, are the groups whose sole concern is with AIDS as a human rights issue.
