First off, if AIDS is God's punishment of homosexuals, then Lesbians, among whom the disease is almost unknown, must be His chosen people.
The conservative magazine Newsmax published an article detailing the grim fact that condoms have not, in fact, done much to halt the spread of AIDS. What does? "By promoting programs touting abstinence and faithfulness, the Ugandan government helped bring about a 75 percent decline in HIV prevalence in the 15-19 age group, 60 percent in those age 20-24, and a 54 percent decline overall by 1998."
Given the amount of noise the gay media makes about AIDS, one would have expected them to seize onto this breakthrough. Instead, I scoured the major sites and found nary an acknowledgement of Uganda's success. Instead, there are just more calls and still more calls for "more government funding".
Leaving aside for the moment why it is appropriate for the government to steal money from its working citizens to fund research rather than leaving that to the far more motivated and historically more successful private sector, how much AIDS funding will be enough? How much will it take to satisfy activists?
From Forbes magazine, 3/28/05.
A similar illustration can be found at The FAIR Foundation.
In 1998, American taxpayers were billed for research as follows: $2,400 per AIDS patient, $230 per breast cancer patient, and $28 per diabetes patient. Diabetes, by the way, kills more Americans every year than AIDS and breast cancer put together.
Michael Fumento, author of The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, says, "About 16,000 Americans died from AIDS in 2002, approximately half the number that die annually from flu. Meanwhile, over half a million die from cancer yearly, with the butcher's bill for incurable pancreatic cancer alone about twice that as for AIDS. According to the CDC, 435,000 Americans die each year from tobacco-related disease and another 400,000 from poor diet and lack of exercise. (Though arguably those last two figures are exaggerated.)" (link)
Dr. Laura Schlessinger was demonized and threatened for stating that people who have AIDS or are HIV+ should not have sex, a statement which I considered as obvious as that when I have a cold, I shouldn't take a sip from my friend's can of Pepsi.
The way to prevent AIDS is to stop having sex with multiple partners. It does not require condoms, free or otherwise, provided by public schools or by drugstores; it does not require federal funding for medical research or "awareness programs"; it does not require marches or demonstrations. It requires one very simple thing: that people treat sex as what it is, a very special act between two people who are deeply committed to each other... and a responsibility. This is why sex is for adults, not children or teenagers: because it is a responsibility, and as such fraught with risk. A person who insists upon having sex with strangers, or outside a monogamous relationship, is, quite simply, not an adult, regardless of his chronological age. And the responsibility, not to mention the power to prevent this disease, is in the hands of every individual alive, not in that of the federal government or of activists or anyone else.
According to this site, "By last estimate there are now over 90,000 AIDS service organizations around the country - surpassing McDonalds, Burger King, and Jack-in-the Box combined." Millions served.
Meanwhile The Advocate, probably the most popular gay magazine in America, is studiously ignoring the facts that could save thousands of gay lives. I spent several hours using their website's search engine to see what their magazine had printed about Uganda. I went through every single one of the Uganda articles. Several of them referred to the success of Uganda's efforts against AIDS... but none of them mentioned how they did it. A few of the articles made vague references to "education" or "awareness", but did not mention that what people were educated about and made aware of was... abstinence. The most distilled example of this strategy is contained in an article no longer on their site, published in their 10/30/01 issue, titled "HIV infections drop in Uganda". The item reads: "HIV infections have continued to decline in Uganda, one of the first African nations to respond aggressively to the AIDS pandemic, the Kampala New Vision reports.... Uganda is the only nation in Africa to show a reduction in HIV prevalence, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS." No mention is made of how they did it, except by "responding aggressively".
UPDATE: I just went to check the links for this page, including the link to the article in the previous paragraph, no longer online. It seems that since I did that research, word's gotten out that Uganda's AIDS strategy had to do with "abstinence" and "fidelity" - you know, those things the Left is always claiming don't work because they can't believe that there are people out there more capable of sexual self-control than themselves. Anyway, damage control has been instituted: The Advocate is now running articles insisting that either Ugandans lowered their HIV rate by using condoms rather than by being abstinent (2005-02-26: "Uganda's HIV success has more to do with condoms than abstinence"), or that Ugandans did not, in fact, lower their HIV rate (2004-09-29: "Uganda's HIV success questioned"). So which is it? If both are true, it means encouraging condoms doesn't help, girlfriend. Do the math.
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