UCSF Professor Challenges Bush Administration's Scientist Blacklist

In today's SF Chronicle, UCSF Professor Nancy Padian discusses finding herself on the scientist blacklist prepared by the Traditional Values Coalition and pushed ahead by the Bush Republicans.

Padian, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, is working to try to keep the AIDS epidemic in India from reaching the severity it has reached on Africa. The Traditional Values Coalition opposes domestic and international AIDS prevention efforts because HIV transmission can involve sex outside of marriage. If the TVC and their Republican allies in the White House and Congress have their way, countless millions more people will die of AIDS, here and abroad.

The Bush Administration appears nostalgic for the Reagan era of homocidal neglect of AIDS prevention. Strange that conservatives are so critical of the now-cancelled Reagan mini-series, for having Reagan say about people with AIDS, "They that live in sin, shall die in sin," yet that remains the Republican AIDS policy.