Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
June 2009 – The statistics were stunning. According to the 2008 epidemiology report issued in March by the HIV/AIDS office of Washington, D.C., at least 3% of the residents of that city have HIV or AIDS. The numbers represented a 22% increase over the previous year’s number of cases.
“Our rates are higher than West Africa,” Shannon L. Hader, director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration, told the Washington Post. “They’re on a par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya.”
The 3% mark also triples the percentage (1%) that health officials consider representative of a “generalized and severe” epidemic, the Post said.
A ‘gay disease’
In D.C. as elsewhere in the U.S., the demographic group hardest hit by AIDS is the homosexual community. Washington Post writer Jose Vargas noted, “Men having sex with men (MSM) has remained the disease’s leading mode of transmission.”
The same was true in Massachusetts when the state’s Department of Public Health released a report in early December. MSM accounted for more than 50% of the HIV cases reported between 2004 and 2006.
According to an article from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the Massachusetts report found that the proportion of MSM who have HIV/AIDS was 25 times greater than men who only have sex with women.
Nationally and internationally the same trends seem to be at work. A report released this past summer by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that MSM was the largest transmission category in the nation – and according to Reuters the only category that showed an increase in the number of diagnoses of HIV/AIDS cases.
At the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City last August, homosexual men got more bad news. As the Washington Post reported, new data released at the conference said, “Globally, men who engage in homosexual relations are 19 times as likely to contract HIV as the rest of the population.”
Such reports have led at least one prominent homosexual leader to admit the obvious. Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the nation’s oldest gay rights group, told the organization’s national conference last year: “Folks, with 70% of the people in this country living with HIV being gay or bi(sexual), we cannot deny that HIV is a gay disease. We have to own that and face up to that.”
A variety of reasons
With the number of male homosexuals in the U.S. around 1.5% of the general population, why is such a small percentage of the total population responsible for more than half the number of HIV infections?
Those who closely watch the disease cite numerous explanations for the prevalence of HIV and AIDS within the homosexual community.
In Massachusetts, John Auerbach, health department commissioner for the state, insisted that the problem is that warnings about the danger of contracting HIV just aren’t reaching gay men.
Auerbach said Massachusetts simply needed to make “widespread free condom availability” an increased priority – including for high school students. Moreover, he said, “more needs to be done with respect to reaching men who have sex with men with important HIV prevention messages.”
Medical experts also blame a number of other factors for the increasing numbers of HIV infections among MSM. Many younger homosexuals believe AIDS is no longer a death sentence because of new drug regimens which keep the progress of the disease in check. Others are simply experiencing what the medical community calls “prevention fatigue” – they are tired of hearing the message and tune it out.
Either way, younger gay men seem to be taking more risks – abusing illegal drugs at parties and gay bars, leading to poor decisions about sex; having sex without condoms; and having more casual sex with anonymous partners.
Homophobia the cause?
But there is another explanation frequently mentioned by homosexual activists and even medical professionals: homophobia. Those who condemn homosexuality on moral and/or religious grounds are accused of creating a climate that drives gay men to engage in risky sex.
Kevin Frost, chief executive of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, told the Washington Post that he blamed the “kinds of stigma and discrimination and institutionalized homophobia” that exist in the U.S.
The AIDS rates among gay and bisexual men are often “directly related to the institutionalization of homophobia,” Frost said.
This line of logic used by activists is not hard to understand. They claim that homosexuals have a sexual orientation that cannot be changed, and if a gay man lives in a culture that abhors him he will most likely hide that orientation.
If he hides that orientation, then he will not be able to seek homosexual romance openly but will instead be more likely to seek out anonymous partners and engage in risky, casual and often unprotected sex. This results in an increased likelihood of getting AIDS.
Moreover, this would increase the likelihood that a homosexual will not get tested for AIDS (out of fear of being revealed as a homosexual) and will be less likely to reveal his HIV status to his anonymous sex partners. So the number of AIDS cases will continue to grow.
As one gay activist who works with homosexual groups in Asia explained, “We live in an environment where nobody likes us. We are told every day that we are horrible. Very few people love us. How do we cope with the constant, daily stigma? We drown our sorrows [through risky, unprotected sex].”
Fallen sexuality
This argument is not without merit when applied to countries that take a hard line against homosexuals – some of which imprison them or even threaten them with execution.
But in the U.S. the case is harder to make – and almost borders on absurdity. Homosexuality is celebrated in Hollywood and the news media, on university campuses, in many public schools and in much of the corporate world.
For example, what could possibly be homophobic about Massachusetts? As a state it has been busily normalizing homosexuality since the early 1990s – especially in the public school system. And yet homosexuals in Massachusetts are still driving the AIDS crisis in that state.
The reality, however, is that the troubles of the homosexual community are wrapped in a bitter irony. The rejection of the Biblical sexuality that has allowed homosexuality to flourish openly in our culture has simultaneously blinded the gay community to the only way out.
Articles by writers like the Washington Post’s Vargas contain numerous clues pointing to the awful truth: Homosexuality manifests a fallen, broken sexuality which drags its practitioners into a slavery from which extraction is very difficult.
Take the article Vargas wrote three years ago about the gay community in Washington, D.C., battling against “AIDS fatigue.” Vargas said that health organizations in the District that target the gay community have spent years – and millions of dollars – trying to inform homosexuals of the risks of AIDS.
“They give out condoms in bars, they pass out brochures, they offer free HIV testing. Added to that are the slew of online ads reminding men to get tested,” Vargas said.
And yet the young gay men in the nation’s capital – and throughout the U.S. – continue to disregard the warnings. According to the Washington Post, the CDC surveyed 10,000 homosexual men in 2006 and found that 47% admitted they’d had unprotected anal intercourse with men in the previous year. That’s just asking for AIDS.
Shawn Henderson, head of D.C. Young Poz Socials, an HIV support group for those young gay men who – like Henderson himself – are infected, told Vargas about the mistake that led to his infection with the dreaded disease.
“People can say that it’s my fault. And it is, they’re totally right, 100% accurate,” said Henderson. “Was it my fault that I didn’t use condoms? Yes. Why are people still smoking? Why are people putting 10 spoons of sugar in their coffee?”
Indeed, why are they? Why are gay men ignoring the advice that can limit their exposure to HIV? Why, according to the New York City Health Department, do 26% of adults (heterosexuals as well as homosexuals) in that city have the virus that causes genital herpes – an incurable sexually transmitted disease? Why did 54% of pastors in one survey say they had viewed porn within the past year? Or, like Henderson asks, why do people do other things that bring harm to themselves?
The fact is that both homosexuals and heterosexuals, both religious and irreligious, both good people and bad, are all broken people. And in the case of our sexuality, well, it’s broken, too.
It’s not just “AIDS fatigue” that is causing gay men to have risky sex. It is a monstrously powerful drive, rooted in a fallen sexual nature that demands to be gratified. All the education available to mankind cannot dissuade that terrible appetite, and all the condoms in the world cannot protect from the strength of the temptation hidden in a fallen heart.
That is not to say that despair is not rampant among homosexuals, and one can certainly understand how such hopelessness might cause a lost soul to busy himself in self-destructive sexual behavior. The same is true about those trapped by addictions to alcohol or drugs, or indeed other sexual obsessions like pornography.
In such a desperate situation, it makes no sense for a society to excuse or even applaud the bondage of the slave. Such an approach, in fact, is as perverse as the bondage itself.
The instrument that breaks such chains is the Gospel, but we are approaching the point at which the proclamation of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (Luke 24:47) inherent in the Great Commission is seen as homophobia – as the cause of the bondage. Such is the dark craftiness of the devil in keeping men captive to their sins.
It seems obvious that the church is coming into a season in America during which believers will face enormous pressure to conform to the world’s celebration of its own fallen sexuality.
But if Christians do not stay the course in preaching the truth, then how will the homosexual – or the heterosexual, for that matter – ever escape? 
