Pro-life video of the day: Elton John blames stigma and hate for spread of AIDS
by LauraLoo
At a recent AIDS conference, Elton John called for compassion towards those suffering from HIV and AIDS – and admits he should have been dead (due to his past self-destructive behavior) decades ago.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12KDneDpH7Q[/youtube]
Of course every human being deserves compassion, but isn’t the real issue in this case about the sometimes devastating choices one makes in life and their consequences? Compassion only goes so far when you (or the person you love) prematurely ends up “six feet under in a wooden box.” Elton wonders how he was fortunate enough to escape these consequences. Perhaps the answer is a sovereign God who has extended greater mercy to Elton, and others like him, so they can repent of their sins and live for Him.
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Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Yes, everyone does deserve compassion.
But everyone also has free will.
Shame has not caused this epidemic.
Promiscuous sex and the entitlement mentality has caused this epidemic.
First, for the record, I don’t think God “punishes” people with disease, but as with obesity and other conditions, yes, sometimes our behavior puts us at risk. That being said:
FEAR of stigma, FEAR of hatred, and POLITICS have been the bane of the AIDS outbreak since the beginning. Americans have completely and utterly abandonned any kind of quarantine protocol because, gee, it’s just not nice to judge. Well people, viruses and bacteria are about as non-judgemental as it gets. They don’t care who you love or what you think, they are organisms with characteristics of their own.
Patient “privacy” has now eclipsed any rational sense of patient SAFETY. Now, HIV isn’t spread by coughing or casual handshaking, that’s true. BUT, it is still a disease and ought to be treated like one. What my gay male friends have confessed to me about their reckless behavior would curl your hair, and much of it I couldn’t even describe here.
Bottom line: we should NEVER stigmatize PEOPLE who have diseases, but we shouldn’t allow diseases to spread because we’re so self-absorbed that we recklessly endanger ourselves and other people. Viruses don’t care about your HIPAA or your politics, they are equal opportunity killers.
I think God does punish with disease. Or more than “punish” He allows disease to afflict those who thumb their noses at His moral law as a warning to others who would flirt with the same sin.
God did not create disease but allows us the natural consequences of our sin.
I agree that we shouldn’t hate or stigmatize those with AIDs. But sooner or later, it all comes down to not engaging in risky behaviors, which is not politically correct to say.
Stigma and hate did NOT cause AIDS to spread Elton. God did NOT cause AIDS. God did NOT cause people to misuse the physiological, anatomical, biological, hormonal, psychological, immunological and complementary properties of the 2 different male and female REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEMS. There is no “gay” DNA, nor bi-sexual, lesbian, transgender or polyamorous DNA or adulterous DNA for that matter. (Yes, I know from working in healthcare rare sexual organ deformities do occur.) Go to the FDA website see their answer why they ask males who have EVER had sex with another man to self-defer donating blood so they do not infect the entire U. S blood supply even if they consistently practice “safe sex” or are now in a monogamous relationship. HIV is caused by what men did with their bodies not by what God made them do. BTW women who are IV drug users, have ever had sex with men who have sex with other men or men who are IV drug users or have ever had sex for money are asked to self-defer as well . It is BEHAVIOR-RELATED, NOT homophobia, bigotry, hatred or stigma related.
If anyone is interested in reading the testimony of an ex-gay activist wh has been set free for years by the power of God let me know I wil give you her webiste which includes a booklist of many other people male and female who have been set free. There is hope.
I think God does punish with disease. Or more than “punish” He allows disease to afflict those who thumb their noses at His moral law as a warning to others who would flirt with the same sin.
So how do you account for all those who transgress who don’t get punished by your late bronze age, male, middle-eastern sky god?
” It is BEHAVIOR-RELATED, NOT homophobia, bigotry, hatred or stigma related.”
In Catholic countries that condemn condom use, it’s absolutely homophobia, bigotry, and stigma related. But hey, if the gays die, there will be more Catholic heterosexual babies to make lots more Catholic heterosexual babies.
Time to dust off your old rhetoric, lady. I have never seen, in any city or county or state, a throng of Catholic guards stationed outside of every drugstore, gas station, convenience mart, and clinic ready to prevent Catholic gay men from purchasing condoms.
However, I have heard gay men tell ME to my face that they know the risks but ‘bareback is so much better.’ So stuff it cc, as usual. Since many gay men are atheists, I wonder how cc intends to police their behavior. Y’know, because preventing the spread of a virus is, y’know, judgemental. Men do have sex on the downlow and then return to their unsuspecting ladies. I know cuz I saw it on Oprah.
Syndey, I love ya, I do, but I live with a disease. There is no cure, and a cause of onset has not been discovered. It is quite painful and will likely shorten my life. There is a lot of evidence that it may be congenital. I may be a pretty big sinner myself, but my relatives who suffer from the same disease do not deserve this. I did nothing to bring it on, but I must live with it every single day.
I believe that God gives us the grace to endure and to help each other. Because of my illness, I cannot lift the elderly people for whom I volunteer. But I can wash their faces and help them eat their lunches. Disease and injury are terrible things, but they come with the opportunity for us to show our humanity. For example, though my gay male friends are guilty of reckless behavior, God also sees that they help one another, shop for sick friends, make meals, and do laundry for them. I just wish they would practice more preventative behavior, but I can’t follow my friends 24/7 and bark at them. They are adults now.
Hate and stigma are how HIV is spread? I thought it was sex, dirty needles and blood transfusions. I guess if it’s spread by HATE that’s how Reagan and JPII were responsible for AIDS. Those two were such haters after all. Ha.
Yes, stigma did have a lot to do with HIV spreading rapidly in the 80s, and has some to do with it now. Funding and research in the 80s was basically non-existent because back then it was GRID (gay related immune deficiency) and because of that particular stigma, it was basically ignored by the Reagan administration.
Now, blocking clean needle programs and sex education has some to do with it. Partially it’s stupidity of certain people who choose to engage in high risk behaviors, but public opinion and stigma have a lot to do with the attitudes surrounding stuff like this. It almost seems like a “they get what they deserve” attitude. No one has ever explained why I would deserve to get HIV at 14 (which I probably would have if it weren’t for clean needle programs) but then claim I was too young to even get a driver’s license. Responsible enough to know not to do heroin but not responsible enough to drive? Lol.
You can claim it’s all personal behavior that causes this kind of stuff, but like it or not people are gonna do stupid stuff for a lot of different reasons, and if something is stigmatized and only talked about in derogatory terms people aren’t likely to seek out the help and education they need.
I agree that there’s a promiscuity component to HIV/AIDS, but what about this little munchkin?
http://reecesrainbow.org/?s=Stella
Stigma put her in an orphanage, and may keep her there. And many more just like her!
“AIDS funding skyrocketed in the 1980s, almost doubling each year from 1983 – when the media started blaring headlines – from $44 million to $103 million, $205 million, $508 million, $922 million, and then $1.6 billion in 1988. Reagan’s secretary of Health and Human Services in1983, Margaret Heckler, declared AIDS her department’s “number one priority.” While the House of Representatives was Democrat-dominated throughout the 1980s, which Democrats would quickly explain was the source of that skyrocketing AIDS funding, Reagan clearly signed the spending bills that funded the war on AIDS.”
http://www.mrc.org/bozells-column/new-myths-reagans-record
Where you even alive in the 80s Jack?
Ninek, not every disease. I was thinking of AIDS specifically. But think about cancer. If you choose to abuse your body with tobacco you just might get cancer. If you choose to ingest birth control pills or abort your babies, you might get breast cancer. Sometimes we cannot choose the consequences of our sin. Btw, I used to smoke and I used to take bc pills so who knows what damage I have done to my body? It was my sin and God may very well allow me to reap what I have sown.
CC, there was an evangelist who came to my church who was HIV positive. He got it from a blood transfusion and then passed it to his wife who passed it to her unborn child. He used to speak about how sin affects even those who are innocent. I think we can see that with the Penn State fiasco. ONE MAN’S sin has affected all those boys, all those coaches, all those current students… people’s lives are ruined because of the selfish sin of ONE MAN.
Lol, I was alive like halfway through ’88! I know how to read though. I’ll link some info tomorrow when i get back on my comp, funding and stigma studies.
CC is really going to have to use italics or quote marks when starting with a quote. I was a bit shell-shocked for a second there! :)
“CC is really going to have to use italics or quote marks when starting with a quote.”
I like to use italics and quote marks at the same time, for no other reason but that they look cool.
Jack, don’t buy in to this malarkey about Reagan not daring to mention AIDS. This was a new phenomenon to everyone. We were told by the turn of the century it would have spread like wildfire. Nope, it was confined to the risk-taking few, and even fewer bystanders like Arthur Ashe and Ryan White.
“Jack, don’t buy in to this malarkey about Reagan not daring to mention AIDS.”
He didn’t mention it until his friend, Rock Hudson, died of it. At that point the CDC and NIH were actively involved in researching the disease because numerous gay men were dying. “Boys in the Band” documents the disease and the reaction to it.
Yeah, I guess Reagan should have gone on TV and told gay men to stop sodomizing each other. I’m sure that would have gone over well. This is almost as ridiculous as the people who blame Pope Pius XII for the Holocaust because he didn’t march an army of armed priests on Germany.
I could care less what Elton John says.
CirCus,
Male homosexuals tend to be more intellingent, more creative and more prosperous than male heterosexuals in our society.
With all that going for them, I would expect that they would figure out it was their own behavior that was putting them at risk.
Why would they wait for a retired actor to tell them to tap the breaks?
Please give us the average number of sexual partners a male homosexual has in his life time.
Now how does that number compare to his heterosexual counterpart?
I would attribute male homosexual promiscuity to a pathology.
Some sort of compulsion is the only explanation.
Exchanging bodily fluids with strangers in an identifiable population infected/infested with an incurable virus is like playing russian roulette with only one round removed.
People ask what the connection is between homosexuality and abortion.
Answer: Avoiding the consequences of your choices.
You loons want science and government to bail you out whenever karma sends the chicken home to roost.
GOD doesn’t even have to get involved, except when HE choose to rescue you.
”This is almost as ridiculous as the people who blame Pope Pius XII for the Holocaust because he didn’t march an army of armed priests on Germany.”
Nobody is blaming Pacelli for the Holocaust. What they do condemn him for is is unwillingness to say or do anything to help the Jews who were being marched off (many from Rome) to the camps. He never issued a public excommunication of Hitler whilst doing so for all members of the Communist party. Pacelli’s path to sainthood has reached a dead end possibly in deference to Israel which was none too happy about sainthood for Pacelli.
“Avoiding the consequences of your choices”
It’s all about choices. And that’s why women deserve to have a choice about what they will do with a pregnancy. There will eventually be a vaccination for HIV and at that point, it won’t matter how much sex gay men have. And BTW, Ken (I don’t play cute name games) I worked in public health during the pre-AIDS days in the 70’s. STD’s were very prevalent in the heterosexual population – and that includes good Christian church folk. I know, I interviewed them about their sexual contacts and they had lots.
CC,
Your comments here have actually been only 50% annoying. That’s kind of a compliment.
I read the play “The Boys In the Band”. I respected the writing, and while most fiction is not really reflective of our own lives in an identifiable way, I liked it. It was very sad, and shows why many of us are puzzled by the appropriation of the word “gay”.
I thought it was written in the very early ’70’s, pre-AIDS to our awareness.
Well see CC, you’re making my point. I know heterosexual people get STD’s. The point is that ALL sexual sin is a sin against our own body! ALL sexual sin is abhorrent in God’s eyes. Straight people who are misusing the gift of sex don’t get to stick their noses in the air and act like they’re superior than gay people misusing sex.
And married people who have “lots” of “contacts” also are sinning against their own body and inviting God’s judgment. God created sex. He has a purpose and a plan for it. When we misuse this gift we do so to our own detriment.
I recently learned of one example of Catholic intestinal fortitude concerning the Nazis. In the Netherlands in 1942, both Catholics and Protestants were increasingly concerned about the deportations. They worked together on a letter and sent it to Nazi leaders informing them that they were going to give a sermon during their Sunday services on July 26, 1942 and read aloud a statement condemning the Nazis and their practices. The Nazis wrote back and told the Christians that if they went ahead with their statement, that recently converted Christians would pay the price. The Protestants declined to read the statement, but the Catholics went ahead with it.
The Nazis made good on their threat, deporting many converted-to-Christian Jews to concentration camps. Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe were both martyred at Auschwitz as a result.
This is not even to mention the thousands and thousands of Jewish children who were ferried out of danger via the Catholic church, many of whom were sent to live with Catholic families who hid them in plain sight.
Now, this may inform some of our readers, but I wouldn’t kid myself that anything I type here will ever have a softening effect on cc’s tenacious and unrelenting hatred of all things Catholic. Get well soon.
Great post Sydney M. It is now so PC that unless you endorse “same-sex” marriage you are attacked as a “hater” for expressing your religious or moral beliefs. Mr. Dan Cathy, CEO of Chick-fil-a is now under attack as a Baptist believer because he expressed his personal, religious opinion on a Baptist talk show. Now the gay activist are supposed to protest at his restaurants with a ”Gay Kiss-In”. Mr Cathy stated that everyone is to be treated with dignity and respect but he is under attack from the mayors of Chicago and Boston who say he should not be allowed to open up restaurants in their cities because he believes in one-man, one-woman marriage, the same belief the POTUS expressed until 2 months ago when he “evolved” to embrace “same-sex” marriage.
Hans,
There are at least two different ‘Boys in the Band’.
One is a docummentary about the CDC and NIH response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
I recommend watching the documentary. Add’s some perspective.
The older ’Boys in the Band’ was made into a movie which I remember watching in the last part of the 20th century.
I don’t recommend watching it unless male homosexuals butters your biscuit. Even then parental veto powers should be execised.
There was no entertainment value for me. It was my girlfriends idea to see it, not mine. chic flics are one thing, this was a slow motion, root canal, beating with endless looping stop motion replays and it was during the ‘disco’ era. Gay disco bars. Pastel polyester leisure suits and platform shoes and Saturday Night Fever.
Cruel and unusal are an understatement.
kenthebirther,
Yes, I know the play was made into a movie. I liked the wistful, melodramatic speeches in the end. I’m sure the movie was much worse.
CC I really think your comments here have been helpful. I watched the documentary and found it great.