Compare and Contrast: World AIDS Day, Here and There

Our "President" actually made an announcement:

In a signed statement on the White House website, President Trump has said: “Today, on World AIDS Day, we honor those who have lost their lives to AIDS, we celebrate the remarkable progress we have made in combatting this disease, and we reaffirm our ongoing commitment to end AIDS as a public health threat.” 

Trump continued: “Since the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, more than 76 million people around the world have become infected with HIV and 35 million have died from AIDS.

“As of 2014, 1.1 million people in the United States are living with HIV. On this day, we pray for all those living with HIV, and those who have lost loved ones to AIDS

This statement stands in comparison to President Obama’s final World AIDS Day address where he urged then President-elect Trump to maintain HIV/AIDS prevention work and highlighted the impact of HIV on the LGBT+ community.

It's worth noting the Trump administration's attitude toward the LGBT community, as reflected in its policy moves:

Since election day, Trump has removed rights for trans kids, banned trans soldiers from the military, appointed an anti-LGBT Supreme Court justice, endorsed a Republican who wants to make homosexuality illegal, hired an Army Secretary who says trans people are diseased, proposed slashing HIV AIDS funding, signed an order permitting anti-LGBT discrimination at work, removed opposition to North Carolina’s anti-trans bathroom bill, addressed a recognised hate group gathering and refused to acknowledge LGBT History Month.

The comparison with Obama is going to annoy him enough, especially since it seems to hit a very sensitive spot -- why else devote so much effort to undoing everything the Obama administration did? But contrast his proclamation with this:

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle attended a World AIDS Day event today in their first joint royal engagement.

The newly-engaged royal couple travelled to Nottingham to attend the #SeeRed event, which was organised by HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust. 

The pair were photographed sporting red World AIDS Day ribbons as they spoke to the crowd.

Prince Harry said: “We mustn’t be complacent. We’ve got everything here: all the equipment, all the testing ability.

"We owe it to this generation to be able to eradicate this once and for all.”

The Prince, a passionate advocate on HIV/AIDS issues, spoke to people living with HIV as well as sexual health campaigners.

Andrew Bates, a gay man living with HIV who met the Prince at the launch of HIV testing week last month, was able to he spoke to the Prince about coming out.

(That garbled bit is theirs, not mine.)

The contrast is staggering. I mean, can you imagine Donald Trump actually shaking hands with someone who's HIV+?

I guess this only points up the fact that real leaders care about people. Donald Trump doesn't.

Divine Retribution

Jim Burroway, in today's "Daily Agenda" at Box Turtle Bulletin, has a couple of interesting items that fall under the heading "Moralistic Reactions to Disease." I'm going to mix them up a bit -- he's following the "Daily Agenda" format, which doesn't necessarily lead to a clear narrative.

First, some fairly recent history, in the form of this quote from the ever benign Pat Buchanan, from a New York Post column in 1983, when AIDS was rearing its ugly head:

Through much of the first decades of the AIDS crisis, moralistic preachers, pundits and politicians described the fatal disease as divine punishment for what they saw as illicit behavior. In 1983, for example, New York Post Columnist Pat Buchanan wrote, “The poor homosexuals… they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”

That's not a new attitude. Burroway outlines some of the history in both entries, which are concerned with the reaction to venereal disease, as they used to call it, from scientists. Yes, scientists.

In 1916, Dr. Winfield Scott Hall, professor of physiology at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, published a book, Sexual Knowledge, “for the instruction of young people, young wives and young husbands… on the best way and the best time to impart sexual knowledge to boys and girls.”

It contained gems of scientific thought like this:

Nature has devised a retribution for illicit intercourse in the form of venereal disease. If the parties observe fidelity to their marriage vows, venereal disease is experienced in wedlock only on very rare occasions, and then through some accidental infection, as from contact with some public utensil, as a public water closet, a public towel, or a drinking cup. So rare is this unfortunate accident, however, that we may say that intercourse in undefiled wedlock results normally in pleasure and gratification to both parties; while intercourse out of wedlock, or illicit intercourse, is destined, as a rule, to be visited with retribution.

There was pushback, of course -- not everyone was a moralistic asshole, not even in 1916. The immediate response to Hall's book came from Dr. William J. Robinson, who, unfortunately for Hall, was editor of the American Journal of Urology and Sexology. My favorite bit from his review (which Burroway quotes at length):

Venereal disease is Nature’s retribution for illicit intercourse. And what is measles, scarlet fever and diphtheria a retribution for? What is consumption, cancer, heart disease, Bright’s disease, a retribution for?

Some years before, biologist Ilya Mechnikov addressed the same issue, in rather more moderate tones:

In the question of the prevention of syphilis, the moral problem is still more easy to settle. … The certainty of safety from this disease might render extra-conjugal relations more frequent, but if we compare the evil which might come from that with the immense benefit gained in preventing so many innocent persons from becoming diseased, it is easy to see which side the scale dips.

Now, lest you think that this is all a nice little historical quirk, think about the current outcry in some quarters against PReP and the use of a potential HIV vaccine. The surface reason is that these measures will encourage people to be careless. I suspect you don't have to dig very far to uncover an underlying assumption: promiscuity is bad. (Even in Mechnikov's comment, there is the underlying assumption that "illicit" sex is wrong, but we must protect the "innocents.")

This is not an attitude that has left us. Do I need to draw the obvious comparison to the "right to life" anti-abortion activists -- who are now revealing themselves as not just opposed to abortion, but to any form of birth control? Yes, it's heavily involved with misogyny, and it comes from the "Christian" right -- the same group that is so obsessed with gay sex, which is, by definition, "illicit." The assumption is that any sex outside of what they deem appropriate is due for punishment, whether it be some horrible disease or merely an unwanted baby that you can't care for. (I'm not going to go into what sorts of sexual behavior are "natural" for human beings -- going back into history and looking at the behaviors of our closest relatives, there are all sorts of things going on, from monogamy to alpha males keeping harems to free love. I'll let the anthropologists sort it out.)

But it's not only about sex -- it's about the whole idea of disease as a "punishment," which on its face is ridiculous -- unless, of course, you subscribe to the belief that we are all born bad. Needless to say, I don't subscribe to the idea of "original sin." My sins, such as they are, are my own, thank you very much, and I'm not about to ask forgiveness for being born.

And I'm afraid that, try as I might, I can't ascribe this idea to anything other than a world view that tries to dictate to nature how it's supposed to behave. (One of my favorite quotes from former Senator Frothy Mix runs to the effect that birth control, etc., are bad because they lead to sexual behavior that isn't the way it's "supposed to be.")

The problem is, nature isn't listening.

Do read Burroway's entire post -- it's quite illuminating.

Today In Disgusting People

Gary Bauer. I'm sure you've heard the name, although he doesn't seem to be as much in the limelight as the likes of Tony Perkins, Scott Lively, and Brian Brown (who just can't seem to get enough attention as NOM sinks under the tide). Alvin McEwen has a revealing post at Justice For All about Bauer's role in undercutting efforts by the Reagan administration to address the AIDS crisis, as late as they were.

And I remember, even though I was too young to take part in, the demand that Reagan address this issue. No one knows what would have happened had Reagan addressed the HIV/AIDS crisis sooner than he did. But it is rather nauseating and disturbing that there was someone in his cabinet who worked to undermine the fight against HIV/AIDS because he felt that those affected “deserved” what they got.

Read the whole post. It is, as I noted, illuminating, and even manages to give a good insight into what passes for morality on the "Christian" right.

Idiot du Jour

Bryan Fischer is, among his other accomplishments, an expert epidemiologist, who knows all about transmission vectors and incubation periods.

Of course, in real life Fischer is a raving rabble-rouser who will say anything that will get him some attention, as well as being an everything denialist. (Denial seems to be as much a part of the Christianist toolbox as projection.)

It's people like him that make me sometimes regret that we have free speech in this country -- but then, unlike Fischer and his ilk, I have no intention of setting myself up as the arbiter of who gets to say what.

I wonder if he realizes how ridiculous he is to sane people.

Via Joe.My.God., where you will also find this article on the origins of HIV. Like, real science.

World AIDS Day

Is today. There are comments an observances all over the Internet, but I wanted to bring this one to your attention:

In time for World AIDS Day on Sunday, Dec. 1, one of the world's largest collections of AIDS posters is now complete and available online, marking the culmination of a multiyear project launched in 2011 during the 30th anniversary year of the identification of HIV/AIDS. Thanks to catalogers at the University of Rochester, more than 6,200 posters from 124 countries in 68 languages and dialects can be viewed by anyone.

The posters were donated to the University's Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation by retired physician Dr. Edward C. Atwater, M.D., '50, an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Atwater, who began collecting the posters in 1990, donated the artwork with the stipulation that it be digitized so the public could view the collection in its entirety. "My hope is to show people the responses from various societies to a deadly disease. Looked at chronologically, the AIDS posters show how social, religious, civic, and public health agencies tailored their message to different groups," said Atwater, 87, who lives in Rochester, N.Y.

The posters provide a visual history of the first three decades of the HIV/AIDS crisis from 1981 to the present. Depending on their audience, creators of the posters used stereotypes, scare tactics, provocative language, imagery, and even humor to educate the public about the disease. Selections of the posters were previously on exhibit at colleges, high schools, public libraries, and museums such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

The collection can be viewed here, but you'll have to put in some search criteria.

Via Joe.My.God.

"Disgusting People" Updated

The Bronze Agers at CBN haven't figured out that you can't really eliminate anything on the Internet. Not only does HuffPo have video of Pat Robertson's unfortunate story about Special Magical AIDS Rings, but DailyMotion also has the clip up.

And now I do to:

Robertson Uncensored: Gay Rings Give People AIDS by dm_521e5ab80f760

Today in "Disgusting People"

I generally try to ignore Pat Robertson. In my opinion, the man is senile and should be under 24-hour supervision, lest he hurt himself. This, however, is too much to pass on.

Octogenarian televangelist and multi-millionaire Pat Robertson has cooked up what might possibly become one of his most vile anti-gay attacks yet. On his “700 Club” show today, Robertson claimed that gay people in San Francisco have special rings infected with HIV that they use to cut unsuspecting people to intentionally infect them. A web search for this phenomenon found nothing, nor did Robertson offer any proof.

“You know what they do in San Francisco, some in the gay community there they want to get people so if they got the stuff they’ll have a ring, you shake hands, and the ring’s got a little thing where you cut your finger,” Robertson told his co-host, Terry Meeuwsen. “Really. It’s that kind of vicious stuff, which would be the equivalent of murder.”

. . . .

“There are laws now,” Robertson lamented, “I think the homosexual community has put these draconian laws on the books that prohibit people from discussing this particular affliction, you can tell somebody you had a heart attack, you can tell them they’ve got high blood pressure, but you can’t tell anybody you’ve got AIDS,” he continued.”

Needless to say, the "ring" fantasy is a flat-out lie. I'm not even going to grace it with the possibility of being just an urban legend that Robertson's repeating. There's malice aforethought in this.

And the part about "laws . . . that prohibit people from discussing" AIDS is laughable. We spent more than two decades trying to get people to talk about AIDS. And now we've passed "draconian laws" to forbid that?

Well, the reaction to Robertson's little dark fantasy has been pretty negative. What did anyone expect? So true to form, CBN has forced YouTube to pull the original video (and there's a full run-down on that aspect at Right Wing Watch), and then Robertson came back with an "explanation." (I'm not going to call it an apology, because it's not.) Joe Jervis contacted CBN directly and got this response:

I was asked by a viewer whether she had a right to leave her church because she had been asked to transport an elderly man who had AIDS and about whose condition she had not been informed. My advice was that the risk of contagion in those circumstances was quite low and that she should continue to attend the church and not worry about the incident.

In my own experience, our organization sponsored a meeting years ago in San Francisco where trained security officers warned me about shaking hands because, in those days, certain AIDS-infected activists were deliberately trying to infect people like me by virtue of rings which would cut fingers and transfer blood.

I regret that my remarks had been misunderstood, but this often happens because people do not listen to the context of remarks which are being said. In no wise (sic) were my remarks meant as an indictment of the homosexual community or, for that fact, to those infected with this dreadful disease.

If you want the context of the remarks, Huffington Post has included the video in their own report on this incident. (I'd embed it, but it screws up the formatting for some reason.)

But, to his "clarification." First off, everything Robertson has ever said about gays is meant as an indictment of the community. He's probably one of the most reprehensible of the Liars for Jesus (TM), simply because he is in such loose contact with reality. That said, no one misunderstood his remarks. The fact that his own staff saw fit to edit them from the published video speaks to that. As for the warning about shaking hands, if the incident he relates was in the early years of the epidemic, I can see that, since no one knew much about transmission -- at least, not the general public. The ring part is pure bullshit. (Although with the right wing, you never can tell if it's a deliberate lie or "received wisdom.")

And just a comment about the mindset of the people who compose Robertson's followers: This woman had to ask if she had the right to leave her church? WTF?

I think that explains a lot right there.

Hat tip to Alvin McEwen at Justice for All.