“AIDS establishment elites lied; gay and black AIDS victims died.”
What an unsurprising thing is this!
How convenient it would have been for liberals if, as predicted by many in the 1980s, AIDS had spread like wildfire among Western heterosexuals. But it didn’t.
It would also have been very convenient if the introduction of condoms had significantly reduced infection in African countries, so the practice of self-indulgent sexual “grazing” could have escaped moral judgment.
But alas for all those non-judgmental AIDS do-gooders: What has worked best and most rapidly to reduce HIV infection among both homosexuals and promiscuous Africans is partner reduction.
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Following sustained public information campaigns, [Helen Epstein] notes, gay sex with multiple sex partners declined by 60% between 1984 and 1988 in San Francisco. New cases of AIDS plummeted from a peak of 2,400 in 1984 to fewer than 600 in 2000.
And then there’s Uganda, where Epstein’s postdoctoral work at the Uganda Cancer Institute sparked her interest in HIV/AIDS. Even though condom use rose throughout the ’90s all over Africa, the HIV rate also kept climbing — everywhere but Uganda, which had actually begun the decade with the highest rates of new HIV infection. As Fumento noted in his column, the proportion of Ugandans infected with HIV plummeted in the 1990s from 21% to 6%.
When the data was crunched by AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin (as noted in a review of Epstein’s book in the June 23 issue of The Weekly Standard), this startling decline was not found to correspond to the increase in the use of condoms, but rather to the decrease in the proportion of casual sex with numerous partners.
For as much as post-Christian sexual morality is touted as somehow superior to the prudish ways of the West’s Christian past, time and again it seems to be the case that applying some good, old fashioned Christian sensibility to one’s sex life is still the best insurance against contracting all manner of STDs. Few people indeed have gotten sick and died from having remained faithful to one sexual partner for the duration of their adult life, especially when that partner has remained faithful to them as well.
Update: Welcome, Steynians!
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