Former editor’s anti-gay argument is washed up
Former Liberty Lake Splash editor Shaun Brown shook up the community weekly’s usual mix of feel-good stories recently with a letters-page broadside about the “very obvious connection between the legalizing of gay marriage and the spreading plague of sicknesses that come from those who choose to live alternative lifestyles.” Pretty incendiary stuff for a paper best known for offering free classified ads.
Brown went on to slam Washington Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray for opposing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. She then threw her support behind Murray’s main challenger, Rep. George Nethercutt – even though he recently came out as an opponent of the amendment in a flamboyant attempt to court West Side moderates. Aside from having the eerie sense I’d stumbled into a way-back machine set for the Reagan years, I felt the need to set the record straight after reading Brown’s screed.
Let’s deal first with the logical inconsistency of her core assertion. It’s a fact that having unprotected sex with multiple partners – straight, gay or bisexual – greatly increases one’s chances of contracting HIV. So, if we accept the premise that marriage promotes monogamy, making it universally available actually should reduce the disease transmission risk in the gay community. Gay marriages certainly wouldn’t be expected to increase infection rates.
But even beyond simple logic, Brown’s argument doesn’t hold water because it’s based on woefully out-of-date assumptions. The days of marginalizing AIDS as “the gay plague” are long gone. If the “alternative lifestyles” she decries suddenly ceased to exist – and few anti-gay activists ever detail in polite society exactly how they would reach that endgame – AIDS would not disappear with them. Here, according to a recent CNN report from Dr. Sanjay Gupta, are the current demographic realities of the disease:
In the United States, African Americans of all genders and sexual orientations suffer about half of new HIV infections, even though they comprise just 12 percent of the population. In fact, African Americans now face the highest new infection rate of any demographic group in the nation – higher than the current rate for gay men.
In terms of gender, one in four U.S. HIV infections hits women these days. And heterosexual transmission rates keep rising, especially in the Northeast and South. Do you really want to know who’s at risk of contracting the disease? If you’re sexually active, look in a mirror.
Worldwide, we’re on the cusp of an AIDS holocaust that doesn’t care which side of the gay marriage debate victims take. In sub-Saharan Africa, the hardest-hit region, 20 million people of all ages, shapes, sizes and sexual tastes have succumbed so far. An additional 25 million are infected.
If I were rash enough to promote AIDS prevention as a local campaign issue, I might suggest concerned voters investigate which candidates support safe-sex education campaigns scientifically proven to slow HIV infection rates. There might be other reasons people of good will can oppose gay marriage, but suggesting such a ban will help stop the spread of this increasingly equal-opportunity disease isn’t one of them.
Dodge that giant carry-on!
The game room just off Concourse C of the Spokane International Airport features a video simulation of air combat. That got me wondering: Does neighboring Fairchild Air Force Base offer a game in which players complete grueling business trips on commercial airlines?
Only driven by a little old Martian?
Confidential to the owner of a certain North Side auto dealership: The presence of a giant inflatable space alien on your lot does not excite in me the desire to purchase one of your undoubtedly fine new cars. But if you ever add pre-owned flying saucers to the inventory, we should talk.
Letting it all hang out
The fine folks behind 7 have let me loose online with a blog at www.spokane7.com/hard7. It allows me to share timely comments on news that might grow stale by the time the weekly column comes out, and it helps keep me closer to readers just like you. As an added bonus, it lets me have some off-topic fun like Dan Webster does in his great Movies & More blog. Check us all out – and that means Isamu Jordan’s Sound Wave, too – at www.spokane7.com/blogs.