January 23, 2003
NOT LIKELY:
AIDS Panel Choice Wrote of a 'Gay Plague': Views of White House Commission Nominee Draw Criticism (Ceci Connolly, January 23, 2003, Washington Post)The Bush administration has chosen Jerry Thacker, a Pennsylvania marketing consultant who has characterized AIDS as the "gay plague," to serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and AIDS.Next week, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson is scheduled to swear in several new commission members. They include Thacker, a former Bob Jones University employee, who says he contracted the AIDS virus after his wife was infected through a blood transfusion.
The 35-member commission, which makes recommendations to the White House on AIDS prevention, is the latest incarnation of a panel that has existed since the Reagan administration. Earlier commissions issued reports strongly critical of the national response to AIDS, and helped to nudge the government and the pharmaceutical industry toward greater action.
In his speeches and writings on his Web site and elsewhere, Thacker has described homosexuality as a "deathstyle" rather than a lifestyle and asserted that "Christ can rescue the homosexual." After word of his selection spread among gays in recent days, some material disappeared from the Web site. Earlier versions located by The Washington Post that referred to the "gay plague," for instance, were changed as of yesterday to "plague."
Mr. Thacker has already withdrawn his name from consideration for this position and I've little interest in psychoanalyzing him, nor any qualifications to do so, but one must note, particularly in light of his comments, that men just don't contract AIDs from heterosexual sex. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 23, 2003 5:27 PM
"..men just don't contract AIDs from heterosexual sex"
Hmm, I'm not so sure about that. It depends (as I understand it) on who a man's "partner" has been sleeping with in the past.
Nonetheless, "gay plague" sounds very accurate to me.
I think I read somewhere once that a man sleeping with an infected woman has about a 1 in 500 chance of contracting HIV. That could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the odds are low.
Posted by: JW at January 23, 2003 6:27 PMI'd like you to clarify your last sentence please. Are you saying
that heterosexual men don't get AIDS from heterosexual sex? I think
Africa, and probably Asia, proves that wrong.
People talking or believing in a 'gay plague' is quite repellent.
God's curse? I guess that presupposes a vengeful God.
If you base your suppositions of a vengeful God on the Old Testament, Alastair, you would be correct. For those of you who have read the book of Leviticus what is right and wrong is black and white!
Posted by: Bartman at January 23, 2003 6:58 PMAlastair, I'm not sure whose "last sentence" you have in mind. AIDS in the West - and certaining in the USA (where I live and Orrin lives) - is a phenomenon almost exclusively associated with male homosexual activity or with those who are seriously involved in the intervenious use of illegal drugs. I have read that heterosexual practices in, eg, Africa can be sufficiently, er, different from those in the West to make the heterosexual transmission of AIDS rather common. I don't know that for a fact; I only know what I've read.
It may be your opinion that discussion of a "gay plague" is "repellent." You are of course entitled to that opinion. But "repellent" as it may be to you, it seems to be more or less true -- at least in the West, and particularly in the USA.
Michael Fumento is the best on this topic:
http://www.fumento.com/pozaids.html
AIDS is a very difficult infection to contract. I don't know if that 500 number is correct, but if you read the latest issue of Rolling Stone, they report on an entire subculture of gay men who TRY to contract the infection, and it may take them MONTHS. The most likely routes of infection are intravenous contamination and anal receptive
sex. It is difficult for a woman to become infected from vaginal sex with an infected man, and extremely unlikely that a man can contract the infection from having vaginal sex with an HIV positive woman.
Considering that the gay male population indulges in a very high rate of intravenous drug use, calling HIV a gay plague is not very far from the truth.
If that's the case how come most of Africa is dying of AIDS?
Sexual practices there surely aren't that different.
Why AIDS is a hetero problem in Africa is a mystery, but probably "dry sex" (go Google it if you like, it's disgusting) is probably a major problem, as is heterosexual anal sex. But OJ should explain how Thacker got the disease himself, if he wants to claim that "men just don't contract AIDs from heterosexual sex." I don't think you can get it from pegging
; either Thacker was secretly gay or an IV drug user, or you can
get it from repeated hetero encounters with a carrier. Which could also explain Africa, where promiscuity and prostitution seem to be bigger problems than here.
Charles:
I'm agnostic as to how Mr. Thacker contracted the disease, though I think his writings suggest a likely vector. It would be unfortunate though if he was both kept off the committee for his accurate belief that AIDs is predominantly a disease of gay men and then used as a (very unlikely) example of a male who contracted the disease via heterosexual sex.
Ali:
One of the things that both Fumento and the late great Randy Shilts wrote about is the need to use persistent and skeptical interviewers in collecting data. It's routine for men (especially those from cultures that remain more adamantly anti-gay than ours) to say that they've never had homosexual sex but a good interviewer will eventually lead them to the point where they ackbnowledge having had genital/anal intercourse with another male, "though I don't consider that homosexual".
News stories have reported that he got AIDS from a blood transfusion in the early eighties.
Re heterosexual transmission in Africa, I thought it was well established that the high transmission rates are due to the prevalence of STDs and open sores, so that blood-blood transmission is much more likely.
Finally, on the subject of 'God's curse,' I can't know what Thacker was thinking, but I suspect the thought is not that God is in any way vengeful, but that God made a definite choice to create the universe with certain physical laws, which mean that certain actions have certain consequences. For instance, widespread anal sex may have a high probability of transmitting diseases and may also help create deadly diseases by enabling deadly viruses to be transmitted before killing their hosts, thus enabling such diseases to evolve. It is not that God bears any grudge against homosexuals today and in 1980 suddenly said "I'm gonna send a plague on those gays"; but rather that the very structure of the universe, designed for reasons we know not, works against sexually active gays.
OJ/Mr. Murtaugh -
I have also read that helminths (parasitic worms ) are thought to play a major part in African AIDS transmission. People infected by the helminths are, for whatever reason, much more likely to become infected with AIDS. This is obviously not a problem in the US.
pj:
There's no may about it. If you've read Shilts's excellent book, And the Band Played On, it opens with a section on how hard it was to diagnose that AIDs was even a new disease because gay men are so disease-ridden from oral and genital contact with feces. One needn't be a homophobe to question the wisdom of such "sexual" practices.
He said he got it from his wife who got it from a blood transfusion.
Posted by: Sandy P at January 24, 2003 12:01 PMAll;
Female circumcision is also considered to play a role in African heterosexual aids because it leads to sores as well.
pj, you obviously don't know anything about
B. Jones U.
It speaks very poorly of Bush and the Republicans
that they would have anything to do with
those zealots. It leads one to think that they
will do anything for a vote.
There are some people that decent people do
not receive in their homes.
"..men just don't contract AIDs from heterosexual sex"
Please talk with Dr. Wife about this one, OJ. I've treated just this week two young men, each heterosexual, each with > 200 female sex partners, in whom I've made the diagnosis of AIDS (while diagnosing their PCP pneumonia).
Men do get AIDS from heterosexual sex. That some men lie doesn't change this point.
C'mon, Steve. Over 200 contacts each and we're supposed to believe that they've never tried intravenous drugs and they've only had heterosexual sex? Credulity straineth.
Posted by: oj at January 25, 2003 1:44 PMBack when you had to have a syphilis test to
get married, my wife did all the tests for a
whole state.
That was enlightening.
When it comes to sexual behavior, Orrin,
there is nothing -- nothing -- that I find
incredible.
Not even that Michelle Pfeiffer married that Fisher something or other guy?
Posted by: oj at January 26, 2003 9:08 AM