Grant Hill, homosexuality and health. (News in Brief: Canada).

Ottawa--On May 7, 1996, medical doctor Grant Hill, Alliance Member of Parliament and now also a candidate in the leadership race, in a speech in the House of Commons, linked homosexual activity to disease. In opposing an amendment to the Human Rights Act banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, he stated that "my specific problem with this bill is that it will produce and allow a promotion of an unhealthy lifestyle, a behaviour that is unhealthy."

Three days later, a Canadian Medical Association spokesman declared that the CMA was "concerned that remarks made by Reform MP Dr. Grant Hill erroneously suggest that homosexuality is an unhealthy lifestyle. In our view, there is no scientific evidence to back such a claim." Shortly thereafter, the College of Family Physicians of Canada concurred: "There is no scientific evidence to support these remarks which only serve to encourage prejudice against homosexual Canadians."

Commenting on Dr. Hill's recently announced candidacy for leadership of the Alliance Party, Edward Greenspon of the Globe and Mail (Dec. 20) attacked Hill under the title "The queer politics of Dr. Hill." Dr. Philip Berger of Toronto had a letter published in the Toronto Star, Dec. 23, 2001, quoting these criticisms of Dr. Hill and concluding, "Perhaps the election of Hill as Alliance party leader would be a good thing. It would expose in a most definite manner the bigotry characteristic of a party that would consider Hill a credible candidate."

Comments:

These attacks seem almost incredible. Many people must know of somebody who "came out of the closet," embraced a homosexual lifestyle, and thereby sealed his own death warrant. In his book And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts described the coming of the AIDS epidemic to San Francisco, and its spread through the bathhouse frequenters. An Air Canada steward, who is named, was the transmitter of the infection to a number of other homosexuals; he kept showing up in the bathhouses even when he had pustules on his face, and eventually had to be banned from them and from San Francisco.

The most commonly quoted Canadian estimates of HIV transmission put the blame for more than two-thirds of the patients on homosexual activity.

In the article "Health, Wealth, and Homosexual Activity" (C.I., September 1996) our contributor John Shea, M.D., brought ample evidence of the connection between active homosexuals and disease. He quoted, for example, the March 1996 report from Health Canada indicating that among adult males 79.6 per cent of AIDS patients were men having sex with men, and that another 4.6 per cent were men who had sex with men and who also used injected drugs.

Dr. Shea also quoted an estimate by epidemiologists that 30 per cent of all 20-year-old homosexual males will be HIV positive or dead by the time they are 30 years old. The incidence of AIDS among 20-to-30-year-old homosexual men, Dr. Shea explained, is roughly 430 times greater than among the so-called heterosexual population.

The statements by the medical associations and the other critics are a disgrace to their profession. They prove that in the present climate of opinion, it is very difficult to state the truth about the homosexual lifestyle. Dr. Hill is to be congratulated.

(Readers may find Dr. Shea's article on our website <www.catholicinsight.com/Homosexuality>/.