James Norton: “I rise to ask the House to reauthorize the Ryan White CARE Act, and I rise with special gratitude to the gentlewoman…”

“I rise to ask the House to reauthorize the Ryan White CARE Act, and I rise with special gratitude to the gentlewoman from the Virgin Islands (Mrs. Christensen), a physician and the leader of the Congressional Black Caucus on health care issues, who has alerted us to a very important date, and that is September 30 of this year when the CARE Act requires reauthorization or it will lapse. We just came to the floor because of just such a deadline to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. I am asking the House to do the very same thing for the Ryan White CARE Act. Mr. Speaker, this is a bedeviling disease. In our country we initially saw it as a disease of segments of the population, and certainly in the beginning it was identified somehow as a gay disease. It took the infection of a young white man, a teenager, indeed, to wake America up to what this disease really means and how universal the disease is. We face the same issue, however, as the disease has moved so largely into the black and Latino communities. When a disease moves in that direction, it becomes too easy for a country with our history to identify it with the specific group that is most identified with the disease. Let us not make that mistake again. It is true that of the cases of AIDS diagnosed in the most recent period, 49 percent were African Americans and 20 percent were Hispanics.…”