Letters in VIEW : Profiles of 13 Victims of AIDS

I was struck by the headline of your article on AIDS, “13 Random Victims of an Indiscriminate Killer.”

How can supposedly responsible journalists go on saying that this loathsome plague is indiscriminate? Is AIDS any more indiscriminate than, say, syphilis or herpes?

The fact is, AIDS is not indiscriminate. The fact is it attacks life styles, directly or indirectly.

This subject goes beyond the question of whether promiscuity, heterosexual or homosexual, is right or wrong. (Most of us agree that drug abuse is wrong.) Personally, I feel the evidence points one way. Men and women who choose to have sex with multiple partners have always exposed themselves and their immediate group to unnecessary health risks.

Clearly, God (or, if you prefer, nature) indeed “discriminates” against such people. But whose fault is it, really?

Shouldn’t we who read and watch the press be hearing more of the real causes of these human tragedies, instead of just the effects? Don’t, or can’t, you see a relationship between our society’s near-total contempt for moral precepts and the multitudinous problems we have to deal with on a daily basis? And why don’t you place the blame where it truly lies--namely on a world gone pleasure-mad?

Casual sex has been accepted since the mid-’60s. It has not made the world better. And now it threatens to replace nuclear war as our No. 1 worry. A disease--AIDS--is not the problem. Rather, the problem--our real enemy--is us.

VAN C. BAKER

Pasadena