CARNAL NATION

 As of today, 22 years of a discriminatory policy against people with HIV has ended. Today, Barack Obama signed the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act of 2009. The bulk of the bill is devoted to providing health-care services to low-income people with HIV or AIDS, but it also ends the decades-long policy of forbidding HIV-positive people from entering the United States, either for travel or immigration. The policy was created in 1987, when panic about AIDS was high and public knowledge about the disease was low. There was an attempt to overturn the ban in 1991, but not only did it fail thanks to pressure by conservative groups, but in 1993 it became the only medical condition to automatically disqualify a person from being admitted into the United States. The new travel rules will become effective in 60 days, just after the beginning of next year.

"If we want to be a global leader in combatting HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it," Obama said this morning. The ban on allowing HIV-positive people to enter the country has meant that not a single international AIDS conference has been held in the United States because the people most important to such conferences—researchers and activists who themselves have HIV/AIDS—would not be able to attend. According to Kevin Robert Frost, CEO of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR),  "The International AIDS Society said it wouldn’t even consider convening the International AIDS Conference in 2012 in Washington, D.C., unless the U.S. lifted the travel ban. Removing the ban opens the door to hosting more international HIV/AIDS-related conferences here in the future, and restoring the U.S.’s place as a leader in the eyes of the world’s HIV/AIDS research community."  Rachel Tiven, Executive Director of Immigration Equality, which has long battled the policy, greeted the news as a sign that misinformation about HIV and AIDS has been drastically reduced in the last 22 years: "The climate has really changed," she said. "This really proves that immigration laws that exclude families and stigmatize individuals are destined to fail." We at CarnalNation applaud Obama's action in eliminating the ban. As he said in his comments this morning (video below) it was, from the beginning, a policy "rooted in fear rather than fact," and by adding to the stigma of HIV/AIDS, was only an impediment to fighting the disease itself.