Why Is AIDS Not STD?

I’m getting older. We all do every day; it’s a fact of life. When we’re young we question things and we allow ourselves to soak up knowledge and ideas and opinions. These things, of course, form us and eventually help to make up who we are.

When I was young, in my teens, I was lucky. When it came to Sexually Transmitted Diseases, we called it Venereal Disease in those days - “VD.” We were pretty lucky I’ve learned. “The Clap,” the slang term used for all VD, could all be fought with drugs, and there were only a couple or three. I only knew one person who had contracted it by the time I left college at the age of twenty.

Then came Herpes. Now Herpes scared us, because it’s not curable. It wasn’t as bad as the others, but sores all over you when you were trying to impress the opposite sex were not at all helpful. It was a nuisance then, and is now manageable with drugs, but it was a venereal disease. Interestingly, VD was treatable for years much like Herpes is today, though no cure was known until the advent of antibiotics in the name of Penicillin and the like in the 1940’s.

Through it all, though, we had condoms, which many of us used anyway because The Pill wasn’t 100-percent effective. But condoms kept you more-or-less safe from parenthood and likely disease-free.

Then, in 1981, a strange series of ailments began to pop up in the male homosexual population in places like New York and San Francisco. Soon dubbed Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), then soon after Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in an effort to recognize that it could infect heterosexuals, it was quickly recognized as a sexually transmitted disease, or ‘STD.’ In this age of the ‘politically correct,’ which I prefer to call the ‘politically confused,’ STD sounds nicer than VD. But, by any measure, AIDS is “an illness that has a significant probability of transmission by means of sexual contact.” At THAT is and was the definition of VD.

Now, AIDS is a disease of choice and of morality. Except for a very small group, AIDS is transmitted by immoral behavior. And it is because of this that AIDS is NOT VD! That’s right. Gonorrhea, syphillis, and herpes are VD. But AIDS is a disease that affects lifestyle. Mind you, immoral lifestyles can be affected by VD, but most are curable. AIDS to date is not.

AIDS has affected the homosexual community dramatically. Now the homosexual community will never admit that their very choices are what drives the AIDS epidemic, nor would the Free Love Generation of the sixties have done so either, I’m sure. But it IS these choices that have caused the spread of this horrific disease. As an example, one of the small groups noted above, those who suffered from hemophilia, have suffered disproportionately from AIDS. Hemophiliacs have a deficiency in the agent that causes blood to clot, and desperately require infusions of clotting agents. Once known as ‘bleeders,’ these innocent people received clotting agent that was a cocktail extracted from the blood of many, including AIDS-infected homosexuals, many who knew they were sick. But, in many cases these infected people donated plasma for money. As a result, many hemophiliacs were infected and died of AIDS. The homosexual community generally ignored their plight, as did the media. Hemophiliacs are well represented in the media, mind you.

I am continually heart-broken when I see a young heterosexual person on TV, a talking head for HIV/AIDS, explain how they never thought they were in danger. How it was ‘just once,’ or he/she didn’t know their partner was infected, or even worse – I don’t even know his/her name. These poor victims are trotted out by AIDS activist organizations and used to somehow make us all believe that we can catch this horrible disease, just by being heterosexual. They’ve been victimized twice – first by the disease and then by the activists.

I will readily admit that a huge group of heterosexuals in the Third World have contracted AIDS. But, without a doubt, the underlying reason that it has spread there is through prostitution, an inherently immoral act. Throughout the world today, if a married couple is free of AIDS, and stays monogamous, the chance that either will contract the disease are so infinitesimally small as to be unreadable. These are facts.

AIDS is caught almost exclusively but those who are participating in immoral acts, many of which are aberrant or abhorrent. This includes homosexuality, drug use, multiple sexual partners, anonymous sex, and the like. These are simple truths. And until we begin to look at AIDS as what it is, a Venereal Disease, it will continue its toll.