The Lunacy of Safe Sex
Paul Mulshine
Does President Clinton use condoms? With Hillary, I mean. If he believes in safe sex, he certainly should. Here's a transcript of a telephone conversation I had with a representative of the New York chapter of ACT-UP. At the beginning, my interlocutor, an altogether pleasant-sounding fellow who identified himself as Vic Hernandez, spoke with great assurance:
"We believe that to prevent AIDS everyone should practice safe sex all the time—it's that simple."
"OK," I answered. "But what about heterosexual couples in long-term relationships?"
"Yes. Even partners who claim to be monogamous should still practice safe sex. One of them might have become HIV-positive before the relationship began."
"Fair enough. But what about married couples?"
"Same thing. I think married couples should use condoms, because the wife doesn't know what the husband is doing. I think you should protect yourself."
"But what about married couples who are trying to have children?"
The voice trailed off: a trick question. Seconds passed. The voice returned, the assurance gone. "Well, in that case they shouldn't practice safe sex ...I guess."
Or maybe they should. The logic of safe sex is so deranged that, when taken to its logical conclusion, it would lead to the depopulation of the planet. Unlike Mr. Hernandez, most proponents of safe sex simply mouth the "AIDS doesn't discriminate" argument without applying them to real life.
If liberal heterosexuals truly believed the safe-sex propaganda, they'd all be using condoms. But they're not. Neither are moderates. Or conservatives. Or even gays, at least not as much as they should. While the" debate over safe sex rages, both sides are overlooking a key fact: nobody uses condoms.
Well, perhaps "nobody" is too strong a word. Just not enough people to make it worth mentioning. Here's the math: According to the census, there are approximately 80 million American males in the most sexually active years, between 18 and 55.
If each of those males has sex one hundred times a year (slightly less than twice a week, a conservative estimate according to surveys of sexual activity) that gives us about 8 billion sex acts a year. To be safe, then, we'll need 8 billion condoms.
But how many condoms are actually sold in the U.S. each year? Just 451 million in 1992, the last year for which figures are available, according to Carter-Wallace, the largest manufacturer.
Here's how insignificant that number is: If in a given year every American male began using his ration of condoms on Jan.1, the year's supply would run out at 6:20 p.m. on Jan. 19. For that night, and every night for the rest of the year, bodily fluids would be moving fluidly into bodies.
Despite the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that have been thrown to the Big Brotherish safe-sex campaign, condom use has barely kept pace with population growth over the past five years; the figure for 1987 was 428 million. This is shown by surveys as well.
A study published in the October issue of the American Journal of Public Health revealed that only 25 percent of those surveyed reported using a condom in their most recent sexual encounter with a new partner.
People with multiple partners were even less likely to use condoms. Those who didn't use condoms outnumbered the condom-users by more than 11 to one. In other words, by its own standards, the safe-sex campaign has been a dismal and absolute failure.
Therefore, since "we are all at risk" (as AIDS activists are fond of saying), great numbers of these unsafe-sex practitioners must be coming down with AIDS, right? Wrong. Even at this late date, long after the heterosexual AIDS epidemic was supposed to have occurred, gay sex remains very nearly the sole means by which AIDS is spread sexually in the U.S.
More than nine out of 10 cases of sexually acquired AIDS stem from man-on-man sex, according to the latest CDC report on AIDS. The only other class of people who acquire AIDS in significant numbers are the female partners of IV drug users.
AIDS is a real danger, but almost entirely to gays, IV drug users, and the sex partners of IV drug users. (Interestingly, very few women have been infected by bisexual men, perhaps proving comedian Andrew Dice Clay's assertion that "there's no such thing as a bisexual.") Except for those three groups, AIDS in America would be an obscure footnote in medical journals.
Therefore, practical safe sex advice would be: "Don't have sex with gay men. Don't use IV drugs. Don't have sex with IV drug users." So why do the CDC and the Clinton administration continue to mislead the youth of America into thinking that a date with a high school cheerleader is approximately as dangerous as a trip to a gay bathhouse in San Francisco?
Man Preparing to have Safe Sex
Perhaps it's because AIDS continues to act in a politically incorrect manner. HIV is like a smart bomb seeking out all those groups beloved by liberals: homosexuals, drug using minorities, people from the Third World—virtually every PC-approved group except lesbians.
(When a purported case of lesbian-to-lesbian HIV transmission was reported recently, lesbians greeted the news like the Immaculate Conception; finally, they were victims too, entitled to all the rights and privileges.) And the most un-PC thing about HIV lies in the people it spares: white heterosexual males, most particularly those who live in suburbia.
All the data so far indicate that your standard white hetero male has virtually no chance of getting AIDS unless he shoots up heroin. He can have unprotected sex with all the women he wants; statistically, he has more chance of choking to death on dinner than dying of AIDS.
An accurate safe-sex campaign would have to tell heterosexual males: "Don't do IV drugs and you're basically safe." But the message for gays would have to be that the activity they consider essential to their sexual identity, anal sex, is very likely to kill them unless they use extreme caution.
Instead, both groups are getting essentially the same message. President Clinton's AIDS czar, Kristine Gebbie, refuses to state the obvious fact that gay sex is inherently more dangerous. Worse, she refuses to even state that HIV-positive people should refrain from having sex with HIV-negative people.
Appearing on "Crossfire" with John Sununu, Gebbie stated that she personally would have condom-covered sex with an HIV-positive person as long as it took place in "a committed relationship."
Gebbie, and by extension Clinton, seem to have bought into the entire radical gay agenda, in which the cause of preventing AIDS takes a back seat to gay rights. In her speeches, Gebbie seems to endorse the borderline-pederastic practice of encouraging teenage males to find their place in the gay community.
In a speech that won her some notoriety, she opined mat AIDS will continue to spread as long as America remains a "repressed Victorian society that misrepresents information, denies sexuality early and denies homosexual sexuality, most particularly in teens, and leaves people abandoned with no place to go." Gebbie also is campaigning to permit HIV-positive aliens to enter the United States.
A certain percentage of these aliens would almost certainly infect other Americans, but again Gebbie and crew hide behind the unlikely prospect that these aliens would practice safe sex, though if they didn't practice safe sex before they became infected, it's difficult to see why they would afterward.
This highlights a huge contradiction in the liberal agenda on AIDS. The typical liberal can't decide whether he's Vladimir Lenin or Abbie Hoffman—rigid state control, or "If it feels good, do it."
Fidel Castro, who seems to have the best leftist credentials on earth at the moment, believes in universal medical care, but he also believes in quarantining all HIV-positive Cubans.
On the other hand, in a libertarian state (of which there are even fewer than Marxist states, namely zero), gays could do as they please but would be left to deal with the consequences.
But only an American liberal would be naive enough to encourage gay liberation and then offer to pick up the inevitable cost: "Certainly at the national level we "have big checkbooks that can be hauled out to pay for things," was how Gebbie, ever generous with your tax dollars, put it.
Those who wish to penetrate the safe-sex idiocy need to look at the real issue. So far, conservative attacks have focused mainly on the fallibility of condoms. This is a non-issue.
If condoms have, say, a 7 percent failure rate but are used in only 5 percent of sex acts, it's obvious that the fallibility debate centers on 0.3 percent of sex acts. The debate should center on the more than 95 percent of sex acts that are condom-less.
This would show that the real role of condoms in the liberal pantheon is not to cover penises, but to cover a gaping ideological hole. So far, safe-sex advocates have been able to hide their failure by arguing that with enough "education," people will begin to use condoms. But no one has heard quite as much safe sex nagging and cajoling as the gays of San Francisco.
Yet many of these have stopped using condoms and are taking their chances, the New York Times recently reported. One 23 year old stated that he had purposely acquired HIV. "It's like the red badge of courage," he told the Times. He said being HIV-positive made him feel "gayer."
Which it no doubt did. All indications are that, as it concerns American sex lives, AIDS will remain "a gay disease."
Gay activists hate that locution, not only because it's true, but because it points up the inherent flaw in the gayrights
movement.
If society is going to create a new class of civil rights based on behavior, society has a right to demand that that behavior either be in society's interests or at the very least be harmless. But the behavior of gay Americans in the last two decades has fit neither of those criteria.
The true goal of the safe-sex movement is not to make sex medically safe, but politically safe. AIDS "education" has a nasty echo of communist "re-education." It's there to implant an ideology, not any useful advice. Young people are naive, some of them so naive that they really believe that "AIDS doesn't discriminate."
The Philadelphia Inquirer recently carried the story of one such teenager who had a post-high school summer fling with the gays of New Hope, PA. He later got engaged to a woman and joined the Navy, where he found out he was HIV-positive. Of course, he would have been safe if he'd used condoms. And of course he didn't.
Safe-sex advocates profess to be mystified over why people won't use condoms. "No one knows why people don't practice safe sex," one physician wrote recently.
No one? I know. My friends know. One summed it up nicely: "Would you rather have sex with a condom, or with a woman?" The idea that sex can somehow be cleaned up and made "safe" is as idiotic a concept as any human has ever had. As Woody Allen (who should know) said of sex,
"If it's not dirty, you're not doing it right." Several million or so years of evolution have conditioned us to desire unsafe sex almost as much as we desire food; only a liberal could believe that this drive could be thwarted by a handful of public-service announcements on TV and a few hours of lectures in a high school health class.
Source <http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/Articles/1994%20January%20Vol%202%20No.pdf>
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