By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For electronic copies of previous articles on homosexual “marriage,” the special rights agenda and the role of homosexuality in the Church crisis, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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“ ‘HIV is a gay disease.’ This is a myth that refuses to die. Misinformation, fear, ignorance and media sensationalism continue to fuel this myth in America. For every one person like me trying to tell the truth about HIV transmission, there seems to be a dozen shrieking, simpleminded, natural-born dullards with a staggering inability to grasp reality. HIV is not a gay disease. Nope” — David Salyer, during the peak of the epidemic.
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All of the major homosexual groups tell us that HIV/AIDS is not a “gay” disease. They claim that it should not be associated with homosexuality in any way, shape, or form because it allegedly leads to the “stigmatizing and scapegoating” of homosexuals.
This assertion is an essential component of the carefully engineered propaganda package that is intended to convince us that homosexuality is just as healthy as heterosexuality. Anyone who disagrees or attempts to present scientific evidence to the contrary is not debated; they are simply shouted down.
The plain truth is this: Only behavior change will reduce or eliminate any sexually transmitted disease, and the first step to stopping HIV/AIDS is to recognize what kind of behaviors help it propagate. In a sense, the homosexual special rights movement is actually perpetuating this awful disease with its actions and attitudes.
The AIDS plague will always be linked to homosexual behavior in the public mind — even if that collective “mind” is too intimidated to speak out. AIDS originated with homosexuals, and 85 percent of all new cases still occur in male homosexuals and bisexual men. In fact, the obituary survey described in the last article concluded that 75 percent of the homosexual men in the sample of more than 6,000 died of HIV/AIDS.
The Role of the Right to Privacy. All people have a God-given right to privacy. This right covers legitimate relationships, such as those between husbands and wives, doctors and patients, attorneys and clients, and clergy and penitents. However, American courts have ruthlessly mined the Constitution to illicitly expand the right to privacy to include abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, pornography — and now, ersatz homosexual “marriage.”
This illicitly expanded right to privacy is not simply some theoretical construct that has little or no application in real-life situations. Homosexual groups have used it to cripple government efforts to curb the very disease that is killing them by the thousands every year.
Organized “gays” have blocked blood screening for HIV; have fought the closing of homosexual bathhouses; have advocated the legalization of both male and female prostitution; have shut down contact tracing and sexual partner notification; have opposed making the deliberate infection of another person with HIV-AIDS a crime; have relentlessly promoted the “Safe(r) Sex is Hot Sex” message; and have promoted the use of condoms, which have a six to eight percent failure rate.
It is very interesting to note that the homosexual strategists successfully deflected their responsibility for spreading the disease by first successfully quashing the labels GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) and “gay cancer,” and then expanding the list of “victims” into the so-called “4-H Club:” Haitians, hemophiliacs, heroin users, and homosexuals, in that order (notice who is last on the list).
AIDS, Inc. The radical homosexual lobby repeatedly accuses the government of so-called “AIDS genocide,” and asserts that the Feds “have blood on their hands.” This attitude is in keeping with the special rights activists’ compelling need to shift the blame for their entirely avoidable predicament onto others.
To show how out of touch the mainstream media are with reality, Newsweek, which has featured AIDS on its cover no fewer than 20 times, lays the blame for the AIDS epidemic at the feet of “homophobia and religious leaders steeped in moralistic doctrine who have suppressed honest conversation about how to stop it.”
We really must ask: Was it priests and preachers who encouraged men to go out and have sex with hundreds of anonymous partners? Did they order homosexuals to grossly abuse drugs and alcohol so that their judgment was impaired or destroyed? Did the preachers command them to fanatically oppose any and all AIDS prevention measures?
Or is it the media that are complicit in so many deaths, because they refuse to back time-tested public health measures, and instead coddle, promote, and excuse everything the special rights movement does?
In perhaps the most extreme statement of self-excusal, Harry Hay, founder of the first homosexual organization in the United States (the Mattachine Society), accused conservatives of developing and spreading the AIDS virus. Hay claimed that “I share with many people the secret, sneaking sensation that, on one level or another, it [AIDS] may have been introduced by reckless Republican reactionaries of the stripe of Ronald Reagan. Not Reagan himself — he’s too stupid.”
Contrary to the high-profile posturing by Hay and many others, the facts show that federal expenditures on AIDS research, education and prevention per person are much greater than for any other killer, including all heart diseases, strokes, or cancers, even though the latter diseases cause many more deaths. As syndicated investigative journalist Michael Fumento has noted:
“A death is a death. We are getting less return for the money than if we left it in the research of cancer and other diseases. People will die of those diseases because of the shifting of money to AIDS. We will never know their names, and no one will ever knit them a quilt or block the Golden Gate Bridge for them.”
One indicator of the priorities our country sets on health care is the amount of money spent on disease prevention relative to the impact that disease has on the general population in terms of deaths, lost days of productivity due to sickness, and other measures.
AIDS now claims an extremely high and disproportionate share of limited research and preventions funds. As of 2015, annual National Institutes for Health (NIH) expenditures per death for AIDS have been 40 times that for heart disease, 12.6 times that for lung diseases, and seven times that for cancer.
The federal government alone has spent more than $367 billion on AIDS and its victims: 2014 federal expenditures work out to more than $38,000 per person with AIDS — and this is for one year only! Care, cash, and housing allowances work out to about two-thirds of this amount, or $27,700 per person per year — and this number does not include direct assistance from state and local governments and private funding.
All of this shows the power of the homosexual lobby as it greedily gobbles up every penny it can get its hands on for its very small percentage of the population, thereby depriving millions of others of badly needed assistance. Christopher H. Foreman, a political analyst with the Brookings Foundation, says that homosexual demands for unlimited AIDS money constitute “a remarkably successful lobby. In an era of diminished budgetary resources, many other things in the public health sector will not get money.”
AIDS deaths have decreased by nearly two-thirds since its peak in 1995, but funding has more than doubled during this time.
This is exactly what pro-family people are talking about when they deride “special rights” for homosexuals. For millions, the debate is more than theoretical: Nobody will ever be able to calculate the number of people who have died because their diseases lacked researchers to work on them due to the massive diversion of funds to AIDS. The funding for AIDS is gigantic and constantly expanding, while other diseases that kill far more people go begging for even the basics.
Lawmakers’ Fears
But still AIDS funding climbs relentlessly, because lawmakers know that if they vote against any increase, the homophiles will instantly brand them as “hate-filled bigots” and “homophobes.”
Ernest Istook, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, said:
“The media pressures and influences depict AIDS as the horrible disease as opposed to one of many horrible diseases. There is frankly a fear among many members of Congress that they will be depicted as people lacking in compassion if they dare mention that [other diseases] afflict far, far more Americans and cost this country far, far more than AIDS does.”
Thanks to the strenuous efforts of the medical profession, AIDS has been transformed from an automatic death sentence into a chronic debilitating disease. The death toll has decreased, but the number of people living with AIDS is steadily increasing, putting a huge strain on the health-care system.
It would not be so if the special rights movement had behaved responsibly since the appearance of the disease.
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