EclectEcon

Economics and the mid-life crisis have much in common: Both dwell on foregone opportunities

C'est la vie; c'est la guerre; c'est la pomme de terre . . . . . . . . . . . . . email: jpalmer at uwo dot ca


. . . . . . . . . . .Richard Posner should be awarded the next Nobel Prize in Economics . . . . . . . . . . . .

Friday, July 08, 2005

AIDS, HIV, and Heterosexuals;
Is the Scare Just a Left-Wing Plot?

I don't know how much credence to place in this, but it seems believable:

Back in the early 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was just starting to break out in the three gay communities (San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York), David Horowitz was one of the few individuals who stood up and publicly opposed gay leaders' efforts to subvert the public health system and conceal the nature of the epidemic.

Specifically, in the name of "gay liberation," gay leaders denied that sexually transmitted AIDS was almost exclusively caused by promiscuous anal sex, refused to close sexual "bathhouses" which were the breeding grounds of AIDS, opposed testing and contact tracing which were the traditional and proven public health methods for containing epidemics, and promoted the false idea that AIDS was an "equal opportunity virus" when in fact it was a virus threatening very specific communities -- gays and intravenous drug users. For speaking truth to gay power, he was widely condemned by radical activists who demonized him and caricatured his warnings as, among other things, homophobic prejudice.

As Horowitz has written in these pages, the success of the gay radicals resulted in a ballooning epidemic that has killed some 300,000 Americans, the majority of them young gay men. The AIDS catastrophe, as he wrote in “A Radical Holocaust,” a chapter in The Politics of Bad Faith, is “a metaphor for all the catastrophes that utopians have created.”

The discussion continues with the assertion that penal-vaginal intercourse does not transmit AIDS. If that is the case, much of the world-wide effort to prevent the spread of AIDS has been seriously misdirected. This conclusion is the one drawn by Michael Fumento in The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics.

Fumento's book has received some criticism, but most of the criticism appears to be of the nature, "How dare you!" rather than "Here's why you're wrong."

I honestly don't know what to think about the debate, but I'm too old for it to be relevant for my personal life; it is relevant, though, for many others I care about. [h/t to BenS]
 
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