“Shall we begin?” Daniel said. “Bob, I think you had something to say.”
Craggy-faced, silver-haired Metzger flashed a tight smile at him and uttered a curt “Thank you, Pastor.” He turned to his colleagues. “You all probably know by now that our friend Congressman Schultz has qualified a measure for the November ballot that would give health officials the right to identify people who have this AIDS virus and quarantine them so they can’t spread their horrible disease. He’s asked us to endorse and support Proposition 54.” He paused. “And by support, I mean raise money, recruit volunteers to campaign for the initiative and to publicly lend our name to the Yes on 54 effort. I, for one, am completely in favor of joining his godly campaign.”
Caleb Cowell asked, “Won’t getting involved in a political campaign endanger our tax-exempt status?”
Disapproval soured the faces of some other Overseers. Cowell taught mathematics at LA State and was as precise in his appearance, thought, and manner as might be expected from someone whose world was numeric and logical. Dan had noticed the older Overseers regarded him with a combination of curiosity and low-grade hostility. This could have been due to his cool, detached personality or, more problematically, the fact that he was the only Black Overseer, controversially appointed by Daniel.
Metzger, ever the lawyer, replied, “The law bars us from supporting specific candidates for office, not from taking stands on issues of public morality or public health.”
“Well,” Joe Barton declared, wiping doughnut glaze from his thick fingers on his napkin, “it’s about time we took a stand against these deviants. God has. AIDS is his judgment on their immorality. Romans 1 clearly says the homosexuals will receive in their bodies the penalties of their behavior. This law would protect decent people—”
John Wilson, a thin, jittery man who seemed always on the verge of exploding, broke in, “And let the queers go off and die.”
Metzger grimaced. “That’s not the kind of thing we want to say in public.”
Wilson snorted. “We’re not in public, brother, so don’t get politically correct on me.”
“All I mean,” Metzger said, smoothly, “is we got to be careful how this thing is presented to the unbelievers because we need their votes to pass it.”
Before his silence became conspicuous, Daniel forced himself to speak. “What’s the strategy?”
Metzger sat back in his chair. “We know the homosexuals will play the martyr card and say 54 is singling them out because of what they are,” he began. “Our side will argue that all we’re doing is treating AIDS like any other communicable disease that threatens public health. We quarantine people with TB, for example, and no one says those people are being persecuted. It’s even more urgent to protect normal people from AIDS because we don’t know how it’s spread.”
Cowell interjected in his mild voice, “My understanding is that the virus can only be transmitted through blood or semen.”
An uncomfortable silence followed this incursion of science, broken finally when Barton said, loudly, “That’s what the homosexuals want us to believe, but they’re lying to us. We know there are other ways to get it.”
“We do?” Dan asked.
Barton nodded. “There’s a surgeon up in San Francisco, good Christian woman, who refused to operate on people with AIDS because so many doctors and nurses are coming down with it after they get that tainted blood into their systems. The hospital fired her so she went and wrote a book that proved you can catch it through, what’s it called, casual transmission.”
Metzger, nodding approval, chimed in. “She writes about two teenage brothers living in the same house. One got the virus from a blood transfusion and then passed it on to his brother who was clean. Those boys were obviously not having sex with each other. Then there was a case up in Connecticut where a homosexual bit a police officer during a demonstration and the officer became infected. Of course, the homosexuals want to suppress those cases and the medical establishment goes along because it doesn’t want to create panic. Me, I wouldn’t shake hands with a homosexual or breathe the same air.”
Barton added, “They’ve found the virus in spit, in tears.”
Cowell removed his wire-rimmed spectacles, cleaned them on a snowy white handkerchief, and observed, “If the virus was transmitted by casual contact, a lot more people would be infected.”
“Even the loss of one innocent life is one too many,” Metzger snapped.
Barton chimed in, “Hear, hear.”
Wilson said, “You ask me, we should lock up all the homo-sexuals. My God, they eat each other’s feces.”
“John,” Metzger snapped. “There’s a lady in the room.”
Daniel glanced at his wife whose head was bent over her knitting, seemingly oblivious to the discussion.
Barton said, “John has a point. It’s the filthy habits of these men that unleashed this disease on the rest of us. It’s time to draw a line in the sand, and hopefully once this passes, we can push them back where they belong.”
“Into the closet,” Metzger said with a smile. “Then lock the door and throw away the key.” He looked around the table. “I move we formally endorse Proposition 54 and coordinate with Congressman Schultz’s campaign.”
“Second,” Wilson said.
They looked at Dan. “Yes, uh, there’s a motion on the floor. All in favor?”
The vote was unanimous.
Metzger gave Dan a sharp look and said, “We’re expecting you to take the lead in this, Pastor.”
Daniel nodded. “Of course.”
••••
The meeting ended and the Overseers filed out. Daniel called to Cowell, “Caleb, a minute.”
Cowell resumed his seat and looked at Daniel without expression. When the room had cleared and the door was closed, Daniel asked, “What did you mean by what you said about casual contact?”
“I meant what I said.” Cowell spoke slowly as if to a not very bright student. “If you could be infected with HIV by shaking someone’s hand or breathing the same air, we’d have millions of cases, but we don’t, so we have to infer that the virus isn’t transmitted by that kind of exposure.”
“What about those cases Brother Metzger mentioned? The surgeon, the teenage brothers, the police officer?”
Impatiently, Cowell said, “They don’t prove anything without all the facts. Maybe the brothers shared a razor or a toothbrush and exchanged blood that way. And the police officer and the demonstrator? What actually happened there? Maybe the bite broke the officer’s skin and the demonstrator’s gums were bleeding. Who knows? Maybe the officer had been exposed to the virus before.”
“A quarantine won’t stop the spread of the disease?”
“Of course not,” Cowell said, firmly. “The latency period for HIV is years. Lots of people walking around now don’t know they’re infected. How are you going to catch them all except by forcing every man, woman and child to take the test? And even then you’d miss some people.”
“What’s the solution?”
“Educating people about how the virus passes and how they can protect themselves while scientists look for a cure.”
“You seem to know a lot about the subject,” Dan remarked.
“My nephew,” Cowell said briskly. “Homosexual, but a good boy. When he got sick, my sister came to me because I’m the educated one. Read up on it. Couldn’t give her any good news, but I learned a lot.”
“There are no treatments?”
He