About AIDS

It's often said that Texans are lucky that the Legislature only meets every other year because if it met all the time, we'd always be in danger. The implications regarding perilous meddling by our lawmakers are certainly borne out in two bills currently pending which would require HIV testing before a marriage license could be granted. Their Republican House authors, Tony Goolsby and notorious HIV-phobe Warren Chisum, are on a foolish track down which several other states have already gone. Those states quickly discovered what a disaster such laws are and promptly repealed them.

The authors would tell you that they are trying to protect public health. In truth, this is just one more way to try to bash HIV-positive people. Such a law will have little positive impact on public health, but will perpetuate negative, sensationalist perceptions of HIV/AIDS. Here are just three reasons the idea is ill-advised:

• Both bills require the HIV-antibody test to be performed within the last six months before the license application. Unfortunately, because of the "window to seroconversion" during which infection may not be detected, having a test at marriage time will not give an accurate picture of present reality and may lead to a false sense of safety.
• People at risk but wanting to get married will just go across the state line to do it. Illinois briefly had such an HIV testing law, and just across the border, Indiana experienced an economic bonanza: They became the "Reno" of the Midwest as marriage chapels and motels thrived.
• All this testing, mostly at state expense, will become a major burden on a public health care system already facing crushing demands, yet uncovering little HIV infection. The states preceding us in folly found that "overnight" HIV testing had unproductively become a primary consumer of too-scarce healthcare resources.

Mr. Chisum and friends, if they cared about public health, would use the same money that this proposal will cost to instead fund a blunt, direct, ongoing information campaign to inform people about risk for HIV and to promote testing among ALL persons who can identify risk behavior in their lives. Those would be public health care dollars well spent.

-- Sandy Bartlett, Community Information/Education Coordinator

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AIDS Services of Austin
ASA Info Line: 458-AIDS
E-mail: ASA@fc.net