Further stigmatize the disease - you know, beyond the facts that it is incurable, fatal and most commonly gotten as a result of engaging in self-destructive behavior...

At this point, the most stigmatizing thing about getting AIDS now is that everyone's known about it for 20+ years. People who got it in the late '70s-early '80s at least had the excuse that nobody knew about it back then. After a few decades of publicity and education and activism, though, nobody other than an illiterate tribesman fresh out of the bush has any excuse for getting it.

Well, it looks to me like living like animals is what causes AIDS. It reminds me of the return of very old problems in the 60's, when clean living was tossed aside to let it all hang out. Bad behavior is not a disease. Maybe the people in the 70's and 80's don't have an excuse.....

The Great Relearning is apparently a project that never ends.

Everybody already thinks I'm a religious fanatic because I see moral dimensions in the consequences of our actions. Well, here goes another one: all these people who knew and understood how AIDS is propagated, but spread false and misleading information for political advantage bear the blood-guilt for the suffering and death occasioned by their deception.

A totally gay story, as bad as the Florida congressman.

Mr. Gots, how do you equate the Florida story with the AIDS story? The first one would seem to be the system working, if a bit of a double standard, and the second would appear to be a cascade failure of sins.......

Even Randy Shilts agreed with Lou.

Everybody already thinks I'm a religious fanatic because I see moral dimensions in the consequences of our actions.

No, Lou, religious fanatics are par for the course around here. It's your reducing the essence of Western Civilization to how one wears his baseball cap that has us all wondering.

But that's ok. With Orrin, it's cars. With me, it's Starbucks. :-)

No matter how much I would disagree with them on a thousand other issues, I for one would like to salute these guys, although I wouldn't bet a nickel on their surviving in their positions. This reminds me a bit of those few courageous aboriginal leaders who stun everyone by coming out forthrightly declaring that alcoholism and other social pathologies are aboriginal plagues and that blaming history just won't do. They never survive.

All three things, the congressman, the disease, the bent hats, are part of the same thing:. antinomian narcissism.

There was a ring of libertines in Eighteenth Century England known as the "Hellfire Club," whore motto was "Do as thou will," and who practiced sexual excess and perversion blended with pagan and Satanic rites. Had they worn baseball caps, you know how those caps would have been arranged.

Disorder and rebellion, and the toleration of disorder and rebellion mark all three manifestations of bent-ness.