by Trevor
Lautens
Barring behavioural changes, 25% of today's young homosexual men will have HIV in 20 years.
Live and let live. That, though more elaborately expressed than I have space to describe, is the position taken by all the major media and their paid scolds on that hot issue of the day, legal and social equality for homosexuals qua homosexuals, like so-called same-sex marriage, gay pension rights and now the gay-and-straights clubs for school-children advocated by the BC Teachers Federation.
Not that some equality isn't more equal than others. Thus the Little Sisters bookstore's lawyers have immeasurably added to the country's gross national candor by arguing to the Supreme Court of Canada that pornography is so integral to gay and lesbian culture that our customs agents shouldn't hold homosexual printed material to the same obscenity test as heterosexual porn.
An amazing admission, no? Contemplate the riot if the "right-wing fundamentalist Christian zealots" on the gay lobbyists' ideological compass had said that.
But on with the "live and let live" argument. Bill Good, a man for whom no road is too middlest-and , to be fair, no more supportive of the gay agenda than Raif Mair and every other CKNW opinion-monger and, yes, every print colleague I know-has put it simply: He can't understand why people care about the (sexual) activities of their neighbors. Live and let live.
Question Period. A "bisexual" man acquires HIV and infects his utterly innocent wife (maybe your sister, daughter, even a leading feminist). How now, "live and let live"?
The wife gives birth and passes on HIV- to an utterly innocent child. How now, "live and let live"?
Bill, Raif, etc., I don't know the reach of your imagination. But it's far beyond mine to grasp the terrible aloness of a passive victim doomed to sicken and almost certainly die from someone else's sexual acts in this case, overwhelmingly, anal sex.
The Jan. 11 Canadian Medical Association Journal carried a study by a team of Vancouver AIDS specialists essential if difficult reading for every citizen, and well summarized in a prominent news story. Buried in it is this laconic projection: Barring changed behaviour, 25 per cent of today's young homosexual and bisexual men will have HIV within 20 years.
I haven't seen or heard a word of comment since. What if certain culture-specific practices promised lingering death, for, say, East Indians? Or Scotsmen? Or Jews? Or Women? Or, God forfend, radio talk-show hosts and aging columnists? We'd have calamity headlines daily. But the gay nation and friends have cunningly shifted the argument from health to rights, whereupon all fa' down except the "bigots."
Christians hold the ideal, breached through it is, that all life is sacred, gay no less than heterosexual. It's the secular straight "liberals," placing the fashionable abstract rights over what happens to real people, who should the answer questions above. Or, decoded, is what they're heartlessly saying, with an indifferent shrug: "Live and let die"?
Question period for Trevor Lautens: A heterosexual man acquires HIV through an adulterous affair, or by soliciting the services of a prostitute, and infects his utterly innocent wife maybe your sister, daughter, even a leading feminist (Too many will die under the 'live-and-let-live' credo, March 25). How now "live and let live"?As far as I'm aware, Magic Johnson and thousands like him have not been denied the right to be married. Careful Mr. Lautens. HIV, unlike bigotry, is a disease that does not discriminate. You'll have to come up with another argument.
LYNN BARR
North Vancouver*** I enjoy Trevor Lauten's column. I find his writing to be stylish, honest, and forthright and occasionally misguided.
For example, he has a very open and honest interest in gay society as do most of us "amateur anthropologists". But he confuses sexual disease with sexual orientation. Apples and oranges. His logic, taken to its conclusion, would say that those who abstain totally from sex would be free of sexual diseases and guilt-free as far as transmission was concerned. True, but beside the point.
If we are sexually active, we will take certain risks. Period.
Everything else is then divided between individual responsibility to try and prevent disease and our collective responsibility to try and cure disease.
If it is of any interest, I am a happily married father of five with 13 grandchildren.
PAUL BOURGET
Delta
For more information, contact:
Bonnie Devlin
Vanguard Project Coordinator
608 - 1081 Burrard Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6Z 1Y6
Tel: (604)806-8306
Fax: (604)806-9044