I have stood in the front yards of Kenyan homes where there was a row of graves of mothers and fathers. Over the past ten years we have worked with 20,000 AIDs orphans in just a single Kenyan Diocese. All of the death was transmitted heterosexually.

AIDs never was just a homosexual disease, it was a disease passed by promiscuous and unsafe sex of any kind. In Africa is cannot be separated from the consequences of economic and political devastation. In the hospital we supported even when drugs became available in sufficient quantities to save many mothers, that left them free to die of malaria or starvation.

And finally, it is ignorance and denial that aid the spread of AIDs more than anything else. In Tennesee as well as Africa.

To clarify, the HIV virus is passed through contact with specific bodily fluids, usually through unprotected sexual contact or contact with infected blood, as in needle sharing or transfusions of infected blood. It is not the "promiscuity" of the person infected that causes infection, but contact with infected body fluids.

David Brass (added by ~ed.)

"it was a disease passed by promiscuous and unsafe sex of any kind"

That's an unqualified ignorant and prejudicial statement.

Tell that to all the unwitting wives and girlfriends who are now HIV positive through no fault of their own, other than they were unaware of their partner's sexual history and/or behavior.

Bro David

I don't think it was just "unwitting wives and girlfriends" that were "faultless" in their infection.

In my years of AIDS Hospice care (from 1987 - 1996) I never came across a dying child of God that earned the horribly painful and suffering-filled death sentence in my view. The judgement and prejudice in these replies is astounding on one hand and absolutely expected on another to me.

I guess the conventional wisdom, shared across the spectrum here (with the exception of David Brass) is that some people deserve to contract HIV/AIDS through behavior and therefore deserve the wages of their sin. Is that about right?

Funny how AIDS seems to be the only disease that carries moral penalty, isn't it? Or do those who suffer from adult-onset diabetes, heart disease, various cancers, and other fatal diseases often triggered if not outright caused by behaviors also deserve to be condemned and called guilty?

I am not sure where my statement and yours disagree, of course innocent partners are affected as you suggest, then work backwards until you get to what I said. Unless it was from transfusions or another route of exposure to other infected fluids, like sharing needles, it was passed.

It is passed by some form of contact and it is passed fastest where people are not taking precautions, acting responsibly, or being honest with their partners about their activities.

It burned through regions of Africa like a wildfire and indeed many trusting innocents were infected.

No one yet knows how it passed to humans and mutated, but it was not as the TN legislator reported.

Priscilla, I don't think that's the message behind the "faultless" remarks. Rather, it's that unwitting wives and girlfriends of PWA's, especially after how the disease works were made known, could not have altered their behavior in order to avoid infection. No one deserves AIDS, or lung cancer, or diabetes, or heart disease, but sometimes we can make decisions that significantly lower our risk to acquire those diseases.

PS Smokers who get cancer, snuff users who get mouth cancer, obese people who come down with diabetes, people with genital herpes, among others, are quite often blamed for having their disease. AIDS is by no means the only disease that commonly carries moral condemnation. Sometimes people do act as if people with those diseases deserve them. They are, of course, wrong.

Michael, by suggesting "blame" through your use of promiscuity you continue to suggest that multiple sexual partners caused the disease. By doing so, you are nearly as guilty as those who suggest this is a punishment from God. In a partnership in which one member gets infected and passes the disease on, this concept of innocent victim implies the other is guilty. It's a virus. Your segregation of HIV patients into innocent and guilty smacks of the same "logic" as the concept of "legitimate rape."

Larry Shell

Priscilla, English is not my first language, forgive me when my use of it fails me. As a gay man, to be sure I wasn't trying to separate the innocent from the guilty, I was pointing out one community for whom the taint stated did not apply. There are certainly others. One would be hard pressed to imagine how recipients of blood products were guilty of anything beyond trust in the system and the generosity of others. And there are certainly many gay men who fall into the same category as the wives and girlfriends who had no idea about what was in store for them when they fell in love.

I also did not imply that anyone deserved HIV/AIDS.

Bro David

David and Bill...Although cigarettes cause cancer and obesity causes diabetes, sex does not cause HIV. To suggest having sex causes HIV is like saying riding a bus gives you a head cold or influenza. It is true that the more sexual partners one has, the more one increases ones chances of contracting HIV, just as the more one rides buses the more one increases ones chances of catching a respiratory virus. However, you wouldn't tell a person that they are to blame for their illness because they rode the bus so much, would you? In both situations there are ways to prevent the spread of virus.

All I am suggesting is that you separate your belief in the immorality of promiscuous sex from HIV infection.

Larry Shell

Larry, you really are reading too much into my comments. I didn't say a mumbling word about promiscuity, or about sex causing AIDs - much less blame anyone for having the disease.

What I said was that there are decisions we can make that significantly lower our risk of exposure to HIV. The specific decisions I had in mind were adopting safer sex practices. There is evidence that men "on the down low" practice safer sex at a lower rate than men who only have sex with men, for a variety of reasons.

Your inference that I was talking about the morality of promiscuous sex was just that - your inference. Believe me, I have far too much of a checkered past (hell, back in the 70s it was positively houndstooth) to preach about promiscuity at this late date.

Larry, you must be illiterate. I have no idea what you are on about. There is nothing in either of my comments that support the nonsense you attribute to me.

BTW, a virus is the cause of HIV infection. Sex is one of the modes of transmission of that virus.

Bro David

My apologies to you both. I singled you out to comment and then spoke more to the thread in general. And in any case I wasn't trying to attack anyone. It's hard to dialogue in this format. I'm sorry if I offended.

Larry Shell

Irony (that, among other things, which separates us from conservative Tennessee politicians) not permitted then, Andrew? Po-faced seriousness only?

Apology accepted, Larry.

I do think the intersection of personal responsibility and moral guilt is interesting. It's very hard in our society to say that we can take responsibility for actions that expose us to the threat of danger without it being heard as if we were saying the fulfillment of the threat were justified, or in the case of criminal acts that the victim is as much or more to blame than the perpetrator. Of course, sometimes people mean that very thing, but I worry that the result might be to make people less careful.