<Back at you: Why is it okay with liberals to pass numberless laws against smoking anywhere around other people, but not against actions around other people that spread a known lethal disease?

Because in one case, the risk is imposed from outside upon an involuntary participant.

I believe that people who are infected with HIV from a partner who has not revealed his or her tendency to sleep around ought to have both criminal and civil remedies available to them. (Reckless endangerment? Microbial battery?) If the risk is known, it's not a criminal matter.

Your remark about drug abuse being a behavior problem is on the money. Too bad we treat it as a criminal matter. Concealment rather than treatment becomes a matter not only of avoiding embarrassment, but avoiding prosecution.

Think about the way gays are treated in some parts of the country, in the workplace, as renters, by civic organizations, by churches. What, precisely, excepting a true love which surpasseth all understanding, is the incentive to form a lasting monogamous relationship, which would also mean coming out to the community?

It's not so much the "tracking of disease" as the forced outing that's the issue. AIDS's spread to the heterosexual population is beginning to ease that problem.

Our lack of public discussion about sexuality combined with our very public undercurrent of sexual behavior ("Sex Sells") will continue to cripple educational efforts concerning sexual behavior while making the behavior itself the forbidden fruit, delicious and secret: bite, but don't tell. Until we talk about sex like grown-ups all the time, recognizing its merchandizing appeal (like hunger sells food), we won't get any kind of handle on sexual behavior education.

The "let's put 'em all on an island and starve 'em to death" school of thought, which Ryan White most famously and courageously fought, though a fringe philosophy, is no help. We all remember, I hope, that during the Black Death whole families were sealed into their houses by civil authorities in some cities, particularly in Italy. In some cases these houses were set on fire by the frightened population. (It did nothing to stop the disease, which existed in three forms of varying degrees of contagiousness.) People would hide the bodies of their family members and try to lie or buy their way out of the house-as-mausoleum treatment.

Scaring the infected will make them less co-operative, not more. HIV is not only less opportunistically infectious than bubonic plague, but also much easier to hide. Even from one's self. For a while.

Regards--
Mary Anne