It has been very important for Gay people to pick their doctors carefully. Although things have gotten better over the years although remaining the same in some places, whether or not to tell your doctor you were Gay in order to get the correct health care often led to medical rejection, settling on a less competent doctor, or lucking out and finding a doctor with an open mind. The practical consideration was that few doctors had any training in the medical needs of non-heterosexual people.
As a result of this search for a good and openminded doctor who would not treat you like a disposable stereotype meant that people often found the right doctor through word of mouth and there were a number of doctors who, because of this, had large Gay clienteles.
When there is a disease among the majority community it can go unseen for a while because the number of available patients is spread over a huge number of doctors throughout the country. Not so with Gay people as the number of doctors was limited, and this made any group anomaly easier to detect.
That is why when AIDS was first detected it was by a doctor with a number of Gay patients experiencing a medical crisis that would not be as readily observable because of the spread-out nature of the number of heterosexual patients.
The result was that while people were concentrating on why Gays were getting sick with the final medical conclusion being it was a punishment from God, unless you were a medical outlier as a doctor and assuming it would affect no one but the Gays, it was already spreading in then heterosexual population undetected because of the bias.
In retrospect in the 1980s a doctor went back over his patients’ medical records paying close attention to those who died because of Pneumonia when it was so easily treated. Having looked at the records together and not individually over time medical, he discovered that as unrelated as the patients were tom each other, many of the patients who had died of pneumonia also displayed other anomalies common in each and realized that had he only had these patients or they were the majority, he would have found his heterosexual patients were dying from Pneumonia because their immune systems were oddly suppressed and this meant they had had some exposure to HIV that went undetected and untreated.
The realization that Straights were getting the virus toom led to the designation of “Innocent Victims”, non-Gays who were getting a disease they should not be getting while it had been okay to let the Gays die.
Had the Punishment from God foolishness that was magnified by politicians who had discovered a new religious political base, things would have been better for everyone.
The support systems so prevalent today to deal with AIDS and other communicable diseases are based on those that had to be established within the Gay Community to address the disease in spite of it being ignored by the government and the medical field, and adopted to address the needs of the non-Gay population. Interestingly, for religious reasons, some places would refuse people with HIV/AIDS from access to the system they were responsible for.
In Texas, four complainants filed a class action lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act’s authority to mandate access to free vaccines, PrEP, birth control, cancer screenings, and other preventative services.
“Because the media coverage of this case has triggered a wave of threats and cyberbullying directed at the current first-listed plaintiff and his family and business, which would be alleviated if Braidwood were designated as the first-listed plaintiff going forward,” the complainants’ attorney has asked the name of the case be changed from Kelley v Xavier Becerra et a, to Braidwood Management, inc. v Xavier Becerra et al.
Negative treatment resulting from treating other people negatively is deplorable and so very wrong.
In this case.
The attorney in the case, Jonathan Mitchell, is the former solicitor general of Texas who put together the law that put a bounty on anyone in Texas believed to have aided in an abortion after six weeks.
In the suit which bore his name before the change, John Kelley, an orthodontist is described as a Christian who is unwilling to support certain forms of contraception or PrEP on religious grounds because they “encourage homosexual behavior and intravenous drug use.”
Joel Starnes, another complainant, claims he objects to the mandate on principle.
“As an adopted son of God, a husband, a father, Texas Native, and patriot of the USA, I am fighting for our Natural Rights – Life, Liberty, and Property.”
Briarwood, the management company and the name on the new title objects to mandatory coverage of STI screenings and counseling for those engaged in non-marital sexual behavior.
According to the attorney,
“The government cannot possibly show that forcing private insurers to provide PrEP drugs, the HPV vaccine, and screenings and behavioral counseling for STDs and drug use free of charge is a policy of such overriding importance that it can trump religious-freedom objections.”
He also claims that the mandates make the plaintiffs complicit in “conduct that is contrary to their sincere religious beliefs.”
The baker making a wedding cake excuse for free exercise of bigotry.
Needless to say, if the complainants win this case, this will spread to other states and the frenzy will begin.
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