AIDS is a disease that historically has impacted the gay community most; however, the face of AIDS is changing, indeed has been changing since the beginning. The biggest increase in rates of infection are current coming from racial minorities and women, not gay men (although they still comprise the majority of new infections, though not by much, from what I remember). Is it reasonable to allow an avowed homophobe to advise the president on what to do about AIDS policy? I, for one, think not.
And, on a more fundamental level, AIDS is a disease - it doesn’t care who you are, what you do, what you believe or anything else. It is a virus that kills anyone it comes into contact with. Any policy regarding its treatment must treat all it encompasses with compassion.
Minor hijack, in the interest of fighting ignorance:
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus #3 (HIV-3) is, rather obviously, not a disease but a disease-causing organism (ignoring the debate on whether a virus is technically an organism).
Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is the condition manifested by many people who test positive for HIV-3 in which, owing to significant T-cell level reduction, their immune system is compromised and they are prey to opportunistic infections.
HIV-3 is transmitted by situations in which bodily fluids are passed from one person to another (saliva being, apparently and thankfully, an exception). Hence two intravenous drug users sharing a needle, persons receiving transfusions of contaminated blood, two persons having some form of sexual relations, or any other conceivable set of circumstances in which fluids (seminal or otherwise) from one are admitted into the body of another in a way that allows their contents to reach the bloodstream. This can and does include normal intramarital sexual relations in which one partner is carrying the HIV virus. It is not a moral judgment, but a disease transmitted in a particular way.
JillGat or another knowledgeable epidemiology geek may be around with further data on this, but that summarizes the situation.
Esprix, to respond to your comment on the OP, the idea of a fundamentalist suffering from it and testifying that it’s not exclusively a gay disease, but a disease that, like most diseases, does not care what religion or morality you practice, just whether it can invade and attack you, would be an excellent idea. I would not be opposed to this guy on the basis of his religious views, but on the contrary-to-fact moralistic stance he takes as regards gay people. You may have noted a few non-homophobic fundies posting here and there on this board from time to time; people like them are what I’m talking about.
—If not, the Texas statute is valid. Either way, the decision whether it does is “judge made law.”—
Oh, I agree that Scalia runs roughshod over this problem far too often, “making law” when he claims to be simply sticking to the letter. But he’s at least to some degree standing on the ground that we can look at what the makers of the law were talking about, and what their plain language states, and what can and cannot be read out of it.
—Is it reasonable to allow an avowed homophobe to advise the president on what to do about AIDS policy? I, for one, think not.—
Well, I guess it depends on what the President’s own views of homosexuality are. Did he ever deal with the Log Cabin Republicans, or did he snub them as so many other Republican candidates have?
Regarding sodomy laws, shouldn’t the 9th and 10th Amendments be considered?
That, coupled with the Founding Fathers concerns about an overly intrusive government would indicate to me that the government is not allowed to legislate sexual activity between consenting adults. Then again, I’m far from a legal expert.
If the Supreme Court does rule that laws against sodomy are not unconstitutional, I have an idea for what could be a fun protest. Anyone want to join me for a bit of sex right in front of the Supreme Court building? After all, if I can be arrested for having sex with a consenting adult in my own home, it seems to me that there isn’t anywhere I can do so. We’d certainly get media coverage!
An amusing idea, cj, but there are probably a large number of public ordinances (public indecency, public nudity, public moaning…er, forget that last one;)) that one could just as easily use (and validly, IMO) to arrest the offending person/party or whatever.
And you most likely would get covered by the media … well, the naughty bits, anyway;)
CJ, the Ninth Amendment (which, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, applies only to the Feds. by longstanding precedent) and the Fourteenth (which has for most of a century been regarded as extending most Bill of Rights protections as against state law), do not specifically address the “rights of American citizens” that are protected from government abridgement. (The “or to the people” in the Tenth is simply to indicate a residue of power that is not delegated to the Feds. nor permissible to the states under the Constitution. Someone, somewhere, beneath a pale blue sky, has the power to pass an ex post facto criminal law, but it is not the Federal Government and it is not the States – it vests in the people, who have by the Constitution prohibited both their levels of government from doing so.)
The problem here, as Robert Bork once eloquently pointed out, is that the unenumerated rights of the Ninth Amendment are unenumerated, and in the absence of a dictum from SCOTUS, we have no clue what they actually are. (Perhaps Stewart’s Rule applies: “We can’t define 'em, but we know 'em when we see 'em.”:D) And the courts and SCOTUS in particular, fearing accusations of reading their own prejudices into the Constitution, have been very much loath to identify a given right as one of those unenumerated Ninth Amendment rights. If at all possible, they will strain a flotilla of gnats and swallow a caravan of camels to find justification for a given right somewhere else in the Constitution, rather than call it “an unenumerated Ninth Amendment right.” The right to use contraception, the right to marry, the right to travel without let or hindrance, and a very nebulous concept of a “right to privacy” implicit in the Fourth and Fifth but explicitly not including the right to commit sodomy in private, effectively sum up what the Court has found that might constitute “unenumerated rights” – but IIRC in each case they’ve found grounds for it somewhere else in the Constitution. (And I’m sure I’ve forgotten one, which a smirking SDMB law scholar will be along shortly to point out.)
Persons on both sides of this discussion have said that AIDS has stricken primarily gay people. That may be true in the USA, but my understanding was that (1) sub-Saharan Africa has far more AIDS cases than North America does, (2) that the HIV virus is transmitted there primarily through heterosexual relations, and (3) this has been known since the 1980s.
The level of ignorance reflected in calling AIDS a “gay plague”, especially coming from a guy who’s got reason to know something about other ways the virus is transmitted besides gay sex, is pretty stunning in a nominee for a position such as this, IMHO.
—The problem here, as Robert Bork once eloquently pointed out, —
I believe his words about the Ninth were that it was “An ink blot” In other words, a meaningless ejaculation, no more meaningful than a pen that had rested too long on the page.
It’s been a while since I read the travesty that is the Bowers majority opinion, but IIRC the court found that the right to privacy had previously only extended to matters of marriage and family (Griswold and Roe both dealing with heterosexual intercourse and reproduction) and thus there was no support for the idea that a privacy claim could be sustained for a non-heterosexual situation. The Texas appeal still includes privacy arguments but it additionally incorporates equal protection claims since the Texas statute criminalizes only same-sex conduct.
Interestingly in his dissent in Romer v Evans (striking down Colorado’s anti-gay Amendment 2) Scalia complained that the majority had implicitly overturned Bowers (they didn’t explicitly overturn it). This leads me into fantasizing that Scalia, believing that Romer overturned Bowers implicitly, will vote with the majority in striking down sodomy laws throughout the nation.
BTW, have you read Murdoch and Price’s Courting Justice? Fascinating work on the SCOTUS decisions involving gay rights since 1954 (ONE Inc. v. Olsen, which I’d never known existed). I picked up a copy on a remainder table. Highly recommended if you’re interested in constitutional law and in gay rights.
