I remember well when the gay lobby told us 10 years ago that this was not just a gay problem, but that this disease would spread widely throughout society. While there has been some small leakage due to blood transfusions and similar unintended consequences, this scare technique has proven largely false.

Get married, stay married, stay faithful - and one is pretty much immune from this epidemic.

Don't share needles in shooting galleries.

It's because "second-hand" homosexuality hasn't een treated with the same hysteria as "second-hand smoke", even though the former's adversive effects can be documented and the latter's can't.

Could have stopped it long ago with the sort of quarantine that TB patients were routinely subjected to.

M. Murcek is on the right track: grab up the sick queers, tatoo a skull-and-crossbones on their p*ckers, and just watch that HIV rate go down and down.

Lou - you missed the words "could have." Too late now. Claiming that a quarantine at the right time equals some sort of scarlet letter campaign now is absurd.

Lou:

The no deletions policy requires that you exercise some modicum of self-control.

In other words: lets spend everyone's tax dollars babysitting adults who will not look after their own welfare. Why not intervene on behalf of base jumpers and extreme atheletes? When one of these types kills himself, do we say to ourselves "his death could have been prevented, if we only cared enough"? No, we shrug our shoulders. The guy's family usually says "he was doing what he loved".

But we do spend billions in public dollars on Raoul's smokers and rescuing your idiots who get stuck climbing mountains and the like.

Is anyone listening? A quarantine would be useless now, and yeah, would cost lots of tax money. Back when it was a handful of cases, though? Oh, yeah, we'll get the argument "We didn't know what we were dealing with exactly." Yes. Exactly.

no, it wouldn't. It would stop -- or seriously slow -- the spread.

They DID quarantine them years ago - placing them in concentration camps with no contact with outsiders - until they died.

Of course, this was only in Cuba - the Leftist paradise. It seems aids is reasonably contained on that Carribean island, versus Haiti where it is rampant - with NO such quarantine policy. Hmmmm.

Yes, the workable isn't always (generally) desirable.

How many times has Israel released bad guys for some cockamamie peace engineered by the UN? I'm surprised to see moral equivalence on this question.

No country or nation can allow their citizens to be taken hostage and must do what is necessary to retrieve them. Isn't the failure to do just that how this all started? Carter proved a weakling and we've been feeling the repercussions for 25 plus years.

My point is that we, as a society, are willing to go to extreme measures to ostracize smokers because it's perceived that they are a burden and menace to society. (Although both are in dispute.) Yet here we have another behavior for which it's been proved that they are a burden ("babysitting adults who will not look after their own welfare") and a menace (primary or only vector for spreading a number of fatal diseases), yet we are doing everything we can to ignore that behavior, pretend it never happens, promote it as "a lifestyle choice", and even make it a civil right.

The real problem is that we are unable or unwilling to forcibly prevent people from chronic self-destructive behaviors. See how we handle the drugged out or drunken so-called homeless, or even the mentally deranged. About the only case where a recent moral crusade has had success of that type is the treatment of drunk drivers, and there's still a long way to go there. (I don't include smoking, because wtih drunk driving, it was that specific action that was targeted, not the more general case of getting drunk and then calling for reinstituting Prohibition, which would be the smoker analogy.)

As for Lou's solution, there's already documentary evidence that a sizeable minority of that population would seek out such people because it enhances the thrill and perceived danger of the activity. (Something about a now respectable activity regaining that illicit aura it once had.) And I don't see why the state should be helping them by providing free certification and trendy tattoos.

Your point is inane. It ought not be legal. Until it isn't we aren't treating them near seriously enough. That would not be extreme.

I had forgotten about Castro's AIDS camps. What is unfathomable to anyone who thinks the left is rational, is how none of his admirers have batted an eye lash about this gross infringement on their rights. No treatment, no drug therapy, just an invitation to behave badly and die quickly.

Forgive the lapse of decorum. I had been grasping at a literary effect which perhaps miscarried.

A strange thing is happening. The homosexual cultural movement is treating vulgar, unsanitary practices as believers regard the sacraments, as acts having beneficient power.

The sense of unclean abomination which had attended these practices had had the effect of retarding the transmission of disease below that level required for the pathogen to propagate itself.

No longer. The homosexual agenda has deeply insinuated itself into public education of even very young children. The curriculum is my school district was deeply tainted thusly. It was to express the lost, or soon to be lost, sense of disgust and shame which should accompany these practices that I experimented with vulgarity.

A much more polite way of putting it--Thanks.

erp:

According to this book, Fidel Castro actually utilized a state agency acronymed MUPA to round homosexuals up into camps during the mid-1960s, where they underwent "reeducation." It was commonplace to "judge" them at their places of employment, and they faced possible imprisonment if their behavior continued. The University of Havana actually conducted anti-homosexual purges.

International pressure brought the camps to an end, but I understand that some amount of harassment continues and homosexuals are occasionally sequestered in their own sections of Cuban prisons (the book I linked to above mentions Nueva Carceral in East Havana as an example).

As usual, watching people work their way around this double standard is really funny. I know a guy who has a high opinion of Castro and likes to condemn George W. Bush for utilizing homophobia for political gain. I'm biding my time for the right moment to ambush him with this information.

My prediction is he will immediately bring up the treatment of homosexuals in America and say that we're no better -- this is his usual m.o. (When I recently mentioned some of Castro's crimes, he replied that George W. Bush has screwed up a lot of people's lives, too.) This gets irritating sometimes but he's a good person and I figure someday he'll wake up.

Maybe there was a reason the cops raided Stonewall Inn. Vice and public health were public concerns in simpler times long, long ago.

Matt, good thing you're so young and have still have lots of synapses to give up for your country. Trying to debate facts with those who can hold opposite and opposing opinions at the same time, I've found to be debilitating and useless.

Liberals have been taught that their "feelings" trump your facts and that being judgmental is the last and only sin they recognize.