By Don Feder, Creators Syndicate
March 1996 – What causes the spread of AIDS? I hope you’re not one of those repressed reactionaries who believes the contagion is propagated by promiscuity, anonymous sex or acts formerly designated unnatural.
An ad (“Does Homophobia Spread AIDS?”) in a recent New York Times claims the fault lies with – well, people like you and me. Why does “concern about AIDS mean attacking those actually living with the disease?” the screed by the Public Media Center rhetorically inquires.
“Irrational prejudices like homophobia have obstructed public health efforts to prevent the spread of AIDS,” the center charges.
The ad ran in the lower right-hand corner of the Times op-ed page – liberalism’s bulletin board, where elitists meet to spasmodically jerk their knees at each other. The libel is instructive only in demonstrating the paranoia and prejudices of AIDS activists.
If public health efforts to prevent the spread of AIDS are measured in dollars and cents, homophobes have been spectacularly ineffective in attempting to obstruct the same. AIDS is the platinum-plated, diamond-encrusted disease which gets a wildly disproportionate share of federal funding.
In 1994, AIDS killed about 42,000 Americans. The same year, more than 730,000 died of heart disease, and cancer claimed around 520,000.
Not counting entitlement spending on Medicare and Medicaid, under the president’s fiscal budget, Washington will allocate $1,134 per heart-disease death, $4,808 for every cancer victim and $71,429 for each individual who died of AIDS last year. Homophobia is not among the factors driving AIDS policy.
AIDS is our first politicized disease – a tribute to the power of the homosexual lobby. There are no cancer activists beating their fists and feet on the floor over “inadequate funding” for their ailment.
At Academy Awards ceremonies, celebrities don’t wear miniature insulin bottles to express solidarity with diabetics (even though, each year, diabetes kills more than AIDS). There are no elderly demonstrators lying down in front of traffic to protest the lack of a cure for Alzheimer’s disease.
AIDS funding safeguarded to promote homosexuality
Activists are intent on safeguarding AIDS funding because much of it goes toward promoting homosexuality. According to an April 6, 1994, article in the Trentonian, a $100,000 federal AIDS grant was used to sponsor a “drag-queens’ ball” in Newark, New Jersey.
We homophobes reckon that AIDS is a lifestyle disease. By and large, you get it from doing certain things that everyone knows are highly hazardous. Trouble is, certain people just keep doing them anyway.
In a 1992 feature on gays, Newsweek profiled Wally Hansen, who works for a San Francisco gay newspaper and is HIV-positive. Hansen believes pushing condoms in the schools is crucial to stopping the spread of AIDS.
But, says Newsweek, personally “Hansen is reckless,” despite the risk of acquiring other strains of AIDS and giving his disease to partners. “I can only think positively,” Wally explains. “I do anything I want. I feel like I’m doing more damage to myself by stressing my system out of worry.”
Just over a year ago, The City Paper, a Washington, D.C., weekly, reported on the doings at an establishment called Men’s Massage Parties (less than a mile from the White House) where more than a therapeutic rubdown is available. A journalist who checked it out saw group sex (“three-, four-or moresome”), often unprotected.
The Washington Blade, a gay paper, urges its readers to practice “safer sex,” while carrying display ads for these orgies. Since the publication clearly is not homophobic, it couldn’t possibly be facilitating the spread of AIDS.
We know what works in combating a sexually transmitted disease – testing and contact tracing. Before penicillin, that’s how syphilis was checked. The average AIDS activist will marry the girl next door before dropping his opposition to either approach.
In July, the U.S. Senate rejected an amendment to reauthorization of the Ryan White Act that would have required HIV testing for all mothers and newborns. True to form, AIDS activists opposed the amendment as an intolerable intrusion on privacy, never mind that children born with the virus won’t get the care they need. For the AIDS lobby, mom’s privacy nixes baby’s health.
Here another dastardly effort of vile homophobes to spread AIDS through ignorance and prejudice was stopped dead in its tracks by heroic activists. Hurrah. hurrah. 
