MNPreventionfunding

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Bill Tracker

Minnesota's HIV Prevention Budget

April 21, 2005

Commentary - Lorraine Teel, MAP Executive Director

With a reckless disregard for those most at risk for HIV, extreme elements in our community have influenced state legislators to introduce dangerous policies setting back public health 100 years. In May of 1895 the great poet and playwright Oscar Wilde was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to two years in prison. Apparently these same fearful and cowardly ideas are still amongst us today, this time sentencing adult gay and bisexual men to death.

An amendment to the Minnesota House version of the Health Omnibus bill hands down that death sentence. The only way to talk to adults about safer sex is to use sexually explicit language, yet this bill demands that the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) not use any funds to support “sexually explicit materials”. Excuse me? When has society ever agreed on what is “sexually explicit?” Who is going to make that call? We use sex to sell toothpaste, cars and pizza. But when it comes to safer sex we are being asked to mask our language, bite our tongues, be polite and for heaven’s sake, don’t give this information to adults. Health education cannot be taught using euphemisms and innuendo. We need to speak frankly about the details of HIV transmission and prevention.

Just this past year, 44% of new HIV infections in Minnesota were linked to gay and bisexual men. Nearly two thirds of those living with HIV in Minnesota are gay and bisexual men. Most alarming – 96% of young men infected over the past three years were gay and bisexual. The Minnesota AIDS Project runs the states largest and most successful program reaching these men.

They were offended by our website. Yes, we have sexually explicit material on our web site. And it is clearly marked that it is intended for gay and bisexual men. Apparently after some activists and elected officials trolled the web site, they were so upset by these safer sex messages they became determined to silence us.

These elected officials want to not only end our prevention programming targeting gay and bisexual men, they want the MDH to stop funding our program working with HIV-positive men to educate them about how to not transmit the virus; they want to stop our program reaching out to injecting drug users and providing them with life saving information so that this virus doesn’t spread in the heterosexual community. And amazingly they want to end the 18-year history of the MAP AIDSLine that provides basic information and referrals to over 5,000 callers per year. All because they were offended? Tell me, what were they doing looking at our website in the first place?

If they had wanted print materials offering no visual depictions of how to properly use a condom or offering only dry text about abstinence until marriage, they should have asked. We could have provided them with such a brochure. But instead they came to a website intended for adult gay men, not supported with any public dollars, and against all First Amendment protections are trying to punish us for reaching a group of citizens, gay and bisexual men, that they apparently care nothing for. Oh, did I forget – in their zeal to keep gay men abstinent until marriage they are also working to insure that they will never be able to marry. Details.

Lorraine Teel
Executive Director, Minnesota AIDS Project

Last Updated: Friday, March 30, 2007
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