WASHINGTON, February 14, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a public statement last Friday, Matt Foreman, outgoing Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, rattled the homosexual activist community by joining the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), pro-family organizations and a growing number of homosexual activists willing to admit that homosexual behavior is both extremely high-risk and primarily responsible for the spread of HIV/AIDS in the U.S.Addressing the topic of AIDS, Foreman drastically deviated from the “gay” lobby’s party line by admitting, “Internally, when these numbers come out, the ‘established’ gay community seems to have a collective shrug as if this isn’t our problem. Folks, with 70 percent of the people in this country living with HIV being gay or bi, we cannot deny that HIV is a gay disease. We have to own that and face up to that.”A little over a year ago, Lorri Jean, CEO of the Los Angeles-based Gay and Lesbian Center, similarly shocked the “gay” community by stating that, “HIV is a Gay Disease. Own it. End it.”
Foreman’s admission comes on the heels of a letter from Matt Barber, Concerned Women for America’s (CWA) Policy Director for Cultural Issues, inviting Foreman and other homosexual activists to work together in discouraging homosexuals from engaging in the high-risk behaviors researchers recently determined are responsible for the epidemic spread of a potentially deadly strain of staph infection among certain segments of the “gay” community. The CDC has acknowledged that many of those same high-risk behaviors, such as male-male anal sex, are chiefly responsible for spreading HIV/AIDS.
Matt Barber addressed Foreman’s admission: “It’s extremely encouraging to see Matt Foreman, a homosexual activist who has for so long been in denial about the dangers of the lifestyle he has promoted, publicly coming to terms with the undeniable perils of that lifestyle.
“I only hope he will now stop promoting homosexual conduct and push for other liberal elites, especially those running our public schools, to do the same. Educators must truthfully address the ‘gay’ lifestyle’s potentially deadly consequences.
“It’s criminally reckless for the National Education Association and liberal educators to put political correctness and a deceptive political agenda above the lives, health and well-being of America’s children. The evidence is there for all to see. ‘Gayness’ is not about ‘who you are,’ it’s about ‘what you do.’ The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has now, in effect, acknowledged that reality. Their honesty is refreshing and unexpected,” concluded Barber.
Honestly I am not a fan of the “AIDS as punishment for being gay” theory anymore than I am a fan of saying broken noses are God’s punishment for running full speed into a brick wall. More accurately, running full speed at a brick wall is a foolishness that laws of gravity will not let us ignore.
For years effort has been made to minimize or deny the health risks of certain sexual and reproductive practices that have become widespread in modern culture. Correlations between abortion and breask cancer, artificial hormones (”The Pill”) and mental/meotional balance, promiscuity and HPV/cervical cancer, and anal sex and associated health risks have been known quantities that were roundly ignored.
I will say that I take some exception to the wording of the article on a technical point. The correlations between HIV/AIDS is more directly related to the type of sexual encounter (anal sex) in the community of men who have sex with men and is excacerbated by levels of promiscuity that increases opportunities for contraction. That is not even touching dangers and risks commonly associated with the community that self-identifies as “gay” for mental unwellness, heightened levels of suicide, drug addiction, alcoholism and higher mortality. A Catholic Answers article on these matters offers a study demonstrating that the average lifespan of a self-identified “gay” (man who has sex with men) is 38. A scant 2% live past 65.
(This is NOT to confuse “gay” and “same sex attracted” persons. Same-sex attracted persons may have impulses, preferences and temptations to pursue sexual encounters with persons of the same sex, but may in fact NOT act on them opting to live celibately the way ALL non-married Catholics are called to do.)
As common a notion as the “right to have sex” has become in the modern western world, the wisdom of this “right” has not always demonstrated itself. In fact excecising this “right” in a manner that contravenes the natural genitive end written on the hearts of men and Catholic teaching, we are finding, time and again, is proving to not be terribly wise at all.
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‘Gay Marriage’ and Homosexuality, Some Medical Comments
http://www.lifesitenews.com/features/marriage_defence/SSM_MD…
Study: HIV-positive Practicing Homosexual Men 9000% More Likely to Develop Anal Cancer
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/mar/07032205.html
Gay Sex in Public a Major Health Risk ~ Naugle Calls on Homosexuals to Stem the Spread of HIV
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/aug/07082305.html
Message from “Ex-Gays” to American Psychological Association: Don’t Ban Therapy
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/dec/07120407.html
Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ a Health Risk Doctors Warn Parliamentarians
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/feb/05021709.html
David Bennett
Jennifer
asimplesinner
Fr. J.
Chad Toney
Jorge Flores
Jonathan B
carmelbennett
nicenehobbit
Jason S
jaybird68
papaz
February 18, 2008 at 7:16 am
Did I start something? When I wrote on gay marriage the category tags homosexuality and gay had not yet been used on this blog. Now a spate. Was this really an untouched subject? Has a threshold unknown to me been crossed? It just strikes me as one of the most obvious fronts in the culture wars and the battle for defining the meaning of sexuality and sexual morality.
February 18, 2008 at 9:02 am
Ah Father…
Courage is a great group.
Courage is on the list of things to do…somewhere between the posts I am meaning to write about the:
* Apostles of Jesus
* Maronite prayer to the Altar
* Relocation of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to Switzerland
* Gustave Doré illustration websites
* meaning of economia in the East
* combox hero on the Byzantine Rambler
* apostolates that send stipends overseas
* Fulton Sheen clips
* New nun’s community in Ohio just founded
* Mile Jesu
* Hermits of Saint Paul
* Chaldean growth in Sweden
* Pope Shenouda’s visit to Columbus
* Vladimir Soliev
* Ratzinger’s book “Without Roots”
* Danish riots
* and the development of Byzantine liturgical vesture in the wake of the fall of the empire and dhimmi status in the Ottoman Empire…
They were in there somewhere!
Maybe you can take that one? :)
Happily, I have more good ideas (or at least ideas about good things!) than I have time to write about… Which is how I find it relatively EASY to post three things a day.
February 18, 2008 at 11:38 pm
Thanks for pointing us to this article SS. Too many groups/elites, etc are so politically correct that I am pretty sure this will fall on deaf ears, but here at PC we aren’t always PC!
February 19, 2008 at 12:56 am
Sometimes the simplest easiest answer to a question, is the one that people do NOT want to hear.
+ What most predominately causes HIV/AIDS to be spread?
+ What is 100% effective in stopping it?
+ Is anal sex healthy or wise?
In order:
Anal sex, not having anal sex or sex with people who have anal sex, and NO.
The real and true GENIUS of waging a war against “homophobia” is it not only makes you look like you are fighting mean people (and no one wants to be mean, so they shut up when being accused of being mean!) and so long as the biological imperatives of avoiding waste and pro-creating are part of our make-up, people’s innate revulsion to certain forms of sex (until it is “taught out of them”) will provide constant and perennial demand for activism and painting oneself as being part of a “victim class”.
As any good victim will tell you, there is nothing more GOLDEN than being a good victim. It assures constant sympathy, and helps preclude too much actual examination or criticism.
February 19, 2008 at 3:49 pm
This story is inaccurate. Mr. Foreman’s comments have not caused controversy within or “rattled” the lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) community. Yes, HIV is a gay disease, but we also know it’s a heterosexual disease; a disease that affects women and men, young and old.
Foreman was calling our community and the government to task for failing to respond to the growing rates of HIV infection among African Americans, particularly gay and bisexual men. By taking one snippet of his remarks out of context, you are missing the point entirely. Here’s the full text of what Mr. Foreman said:
“Today, right now, more than 45 percent of African-American gay and bi men in key urban areas are infected with HIV, with a 33 percent increase in new diagnoses among our brothers under age 30 over the past six years. Today, right now, African Americans are nearly 10 times more likely than white people to be diagnosed with AIDS.
The response — internal to our community and external — is appallingly racist. Internally, when these numbers come out, the “established” gay community seems to have a collective shrug as if this isn’t our problem. Folks, with 70 percent of the people in this country living with HIV being gay or bi, we cannot deny that HIV is a gay disease. We have to own that and face up to that.
Even more disgusting is the response of our government. Of the 129 interventions developed and approved by the CDC to address HIV in the African-American community, only one has been designed for gay black men. Twenty-six years into the epidemic and only one out of 129 addresses the group of people most affected by HIV. And, on top of that, funding for meaningful and honest prevention programs has been systematically excised from the federal budget. If these things don’t prove that our government considers the lives of gay black men utterly expendable, I don’t know what does.”
A full text of Foreman’s remarks can be found at http://www.thetaskforce.org/press/releases/prcc08_mfspeech_020808
Roberta Sklar
Communications Director
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
February 19, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Ms. Sklar,
I can’t say that I can discern a defense of your thesis that the story is inaccurate. If you contend that it is inaccurate because the remarks he made “have not caused controversy within or “rattled” the lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) community.” then I suppose what would be in order is a study that shows surveyed members of that community were not rattled.
Every few years a buried “non-story” about the widespread myth of a heterosexual HIV/AIDS pandemic among non-IV drug users who have vaginal heterosexual relations is published and then roundly ignored. Any story that dares suggest that the African AIDS crisis is often misrepresented as many deaths which are attributed to AIDS and AIDS-related disease occur among populations that aren’t actually tested for the presense HIV. All of the sudden, thousands and thousands of people who die of what people in poor third-world countries have been dying of for years - like malaria and dysntary - are appropriated as statistics for HIV/AIDS mortality.
Do only persons in the community of men who have sex with men contract HIV? No. On the other hand, is much made of how the preponderence of new infections are localized among a small single-digit minority of the same (men who have sex with men)? Again, no.
March 11, 2008 at 6:59 pm
[...] Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, pedophilia, Sex — Lorenzo E. Danielsson @ 18:58 ..or at least this post attributes these claims to the National Gay and Lesbian Task [...]
March 11, 2008 at 8:56 pm
To the last poster.
While I sympathize with the frustration of the gay community for the way it is sometimes portrayed, I see no justification of the broad charges leveled in your post on your own blog.
There is nothing in this post on PC which is hateful or even disrespectful of gays. The Christian position is always one of respect and dignity first. Yes, there are real moral and even health problems with homosexual behavior, but saying this is not an act of hatred. On the contrary, we regard it is as an act of mercy, just as is teaching a child the meaning of the word, “HOT!”
Respectful dialogue is based on an attempt at mutual understanding. There is nothing in your blog post that suggests that you are ready for such. Indeed, I find there is many more times the animosity and hatred from the gay community (and your blog post) toward Catholicism than you claim Catholicism has for homosexuals. I pray that you come to the same openness to Christians and Christianity as the gay community demands the world to extend to homosexuals and homosexuality.
March 11, 2008 at 9:21 pm
That post quotes the original article… http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/feb/08021402.html
If you have issue with the claims - you have issue with them.
Just to be clear - if we quit teaching anything about sex, would people stop dying of aids? Would the new strains of heptatitis and syphallis outbreaks that have especially hit hard the community of men who have sex with men in the past few years… Would those go away? Is that our fault?
I would be curious if you would be interested in rebutting any of the statistics… or opening your eyes to the fact that 80% of new cases are still among >3% of the population of men who have sex with men?
Or do you just want snyde comments about Christians being hateful?
And thanks for showing how note hateful you as a non-Christian are by writing: “What about Catholics and their *cough, cough* preferences for young boys?” Presumably meant to address the less than 2% of the clergy that have so much as been accused…
And 80%+ of the “Pedophile victims” have been teenage boys… (Kind of re-enforces the stereotype of another gay problem…)
But thanks for adding to the hits…
We will keep you in our prayers.
God bless you.