WE ARE heartened by the fact that so far there has been none of the stupid noises by Correctional Officers or their trade unions to incite violence in the prisons as was the case just under a decade ago when the then head of the Correctional Services proposed the distribution of condoms in prisons.
For just as Col. John Prescod's idea deserved support then, so too does Mr. Horace Dalley's backing of the proposal. For what the Health Minister has accepted, and from which there is no escape, some of the male inmates of the island's prisons do have sex with each other and are at risk of HIV/AIDS.
This is not a case of supporting homosexuality or placing an imprimatur on what some see as a deviant lifestyle. Rather, it is being pragmatic, given Jamaica's already relatively high incidence of HIV/AIDS and the danger of worsening the problem.
For, as Mr Dalley reported last week, about five per cent of Jamaica's prison population is exposed to the HIV/AIDS virus. This is a ratio that could grow if these inmates have homosexual sex while in prison, or enter in heterosexual relationships on their release.
Or, looked at another way, it is naive bordering on the stupid, that we still assume that HIV/AIDS is primarily a homosexual disease that can be kept among 'them' and away from 'us'. Rather, HIV/AIDS is a disease to which the whole society is susceptible and therefore cannot be contained by bigotry or murder, as happened to the 17 prisoners killed by fellow inmates in 1997.
Neither does moral outrage, contrived or otherwise, deal with this problem, which is why we also support the campaign by Dr Peter Figueroa, who heads the Government's anti-AIDS initiative, for the repeal of laws which tend to drive some patients of HIV/AIDS underground.
Last week, in his presentation to the Joint Select Committee of Parliament on the proposed Charter of Rights, Dr. Figueroa called for the repeal of laws prohibiting sexual acts between consenting adults, be these buggery, sodomy, fornication or prostitution. It is a fact that these acts, especially those between males, carry a societal stigma, complicated by the fact that they are illegal.
People who engage in homosexual sex who find themselves ill, are therefore less likely to seek treatment choosing rather to go deeper underground. That can't be good for the society.
We need not embrace other people's lifestyles to understand or embrace an enlightened position. What people do in the privacy of their bedrooms ought to be their own business unless there is some voyeuristic pleasure from knowing and punishing them, either via the law, social stigma or physical abuse. These do us no good, and, on balance, are bad for the society.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
