AMA Votes to Ban Discrimination Against Its Homosexual Doctors

CHICAGO —  The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday banned discrimination against homosexual doctors in the AMA.

“We are very pleased at what happened today,” Dr. John L. Clowe, departing AMA president, said of the policy-makers’ decision to add the words “sexual orientation” to the association’s non-discrimination bylaw.

“There are many physicians in this country who feel they have been denied a place at the discussion in the (AMA) House of Delegates, in the house of medicine itself,” Clowe said after the vote at the AMA’s annual meeting.

The policy-making House of Delegates had wrestled with the issue for five years. Opponents argued that the 297,000-member AMA has never refused membership to gay doctors and that changing the bylaw implies otherwise.

But in testimony at an AMA hearing Monday, several homosexual physicians said they fear disclosing their sexual orientation to colleagues. They said many gay patients also fear revealing their orientation to physicians.

Benjamin Schatz, executive director of the gay-oriented American Assn. of Physicians for Human Rights, said the vote Tuesday acknowledged that gay physicians are an increasing force in medicine. He said his San Francisco-based group has doubled in size over the past year to more than 1,000 members in 46 states.