—Jerry Thacker’s selection to an AIDS panel must have appeared reasonable to the person who selected him, because Thacker and his wife both are HIV positive.—
I suppose your theory, then, is that the administration just looked in the phonebook under “wife gave him AIDS after a bad transfusion”?
Give me a break: Thacker’s opinions were not a secret. They weren’t from some obscure interview he gave to Southern Partisan magazine after which he denied knowing what sort of publication it was. He’s a Bob Jones grad/ex-teacher whose political occupation is lobbying on behalf of these views. He is active within the homosexual “recovery” movement. He believes homosexuality to be a mental illness. His own standard story about the transfusion always references his fear of the disease tainting him with the sin of homosexuality. I mean, it wasn’t a secret: they were his advertised qualifications!
Well, when AIDS first came out in the late 1970s, it was originally called GRID, for Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease. Thats because all of the original cases in this country were seen in homosexuals who practiced anal sex.
Without endorsing his views, it seems to me that a fundamentelist suffering from the virus is a good choice for this committee. I would think that we’d want the actions of this panel to have as wide an audience and as broad an encorsement as possible.
Thacker being HIV positive sends a message to the pious in their pulpits about the nature of this disease that effects us all. Exlcuding him becuase he represents groups that we don’t like and attitudes we don’t endorse is a bad idea.
This isn’t about exclusion or ideology, at least IMO.
What the heck! Late 70s, Early 80s? I was a kid then! I knew it was around that era.
And of course not all of the early cases were homosexual men. But most of them were.
Lets not forget Patient Zero. He was the homosexual flight attendent who was traced to many of the original AIDS cases in the US. Evidently, he even coined a phrase for the disease, “gay cancer”. According to the reports, he would have anal sex with other, unwitting men. And then, when they were done, he would turn on the lights and point out the sores on his body and say “I’ve got the gay cancer, and now you have it too”.
I give it until the '04 elections. If there’s not some major changes around here I’m headed north to Canada. Beady eyes and floppy heads be damned!
On a more serious note though: What a fucking pack of barbarians. It never ceases to amaze me how we can let such an immoral and reprehensible group of subhumans “govern” us.
Why don’t you listen to Scylla, obviously you’re just being a mean spirited bigot to discriminate against someone based only on the fact that they are an ignorant hate filled piece of shit who would gladly discriminate against you. Never mind that the statements the guy made make me doubt he cares about protecting the “bad people.”
I don’t know, Scylla, I think you’re being much too confident in the belief that there would be some sort of unspoken, secondary message sent by the appointment that’s stronger than the statements that Thacker has said “out loud,” statements that there is no evidence of him actually repudiating. The stronger message, IMO, whether true or not, is that the administration agrees with this characterization of gay AIDS sufferers, and would form policy recommendations accordingly.
And I believe that those attitudes are relevant, since this position would give him quite a bit of influence over the very people he seems to so dislike. I think that’s a much more important consideration than the (again) unspoken message you talk about.
And I’d like to ask the question asked in a similar thread elsewhere: if, as Ari Fleischer says, President Bush finds Thacker’s POV to be so abhorrent, why was he appointed in the first place?
During the first polio epidemic, it was called “infantile paralysis” because it was thought that only children got it. If “God” created GRID to kill gays, “God” must have wanted chldren to be paralysed and even die from infantile paralysis.
Isn’t there a pending Supreme Court case that could get all the state sodomy laws overturned? I thought I read something about that recently, maybe even on this board. It was something to the effect that state legislatures will never get around to officially repealing these laws, so the SC could spare them the trouble if they ruled a certain way in this one case.
But is it worth having this expanded “audience” if the message coming from the Commission is compromised as a result? How much good is it going to do people living with HIV/AIDS if one of the key messages coming from a member of this Commission is little more than anti-gay ranting? The fact is that even if the others on the Commission don’t agree with him, he can still make pronouncements that will be believed by many to speak for the Commission as a whole, simply by virtue of his membership.
We have, thankfully, largely left behind the idea that there are “good” HIV/AIDS victims (blood transfusions, Magic Johnson, etc.) and “bad” HIV/AIDS victims (homosexuals, drug users). Having a guy like this on the Commission would do much to help reinstate this ridiulous categorization, if his record is any indication.
I don’t deny the guy the right to his prejudices. He can think and say whatever he likes, no matter how ignorant. But, in a country with so many HIV+ people, does this particular individual really need to be one of the 35 or so who serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission? I for one am glad he’s not going to be on it.
Let’s clean this little canard up, shall we? Although there was a person referred to as “Patient Zero”, he was not taken to be the unique source of HIV; he was merely the subject of an epidemiological study by the Centers for Disease Control, wherein a list of his sexual partners was surveyed for the disease in order to demonstrate that it was sexually transmitted. There was nothing special about him except that he had kept track of his sex partners. Plenty of AIDS cases had been identified in North America prior to Patient Zero. Cite when I get home from Toronto or when Hamish finds this thread, whichever comes first.