Dear Sally Kern--
GO AWAY. NO ONE LIKES YOU.
Yours in Christ--
--ERV
Good Ol Sally Kern is in the news again, repeating the same BS that a hateful piece of shit, Fred Pope, was saying that helped drive a gay boy to suicide this time last year.
Yaaaaay...
You know if you just look at it in practical terms, which has destroyed and ended the life of more people? Terrorism attack here in America or HIV/AIDS? In the last twenty years, fifteen to twenty years, we've had maybe three terrorist attacks on our soil with a little over 5,000 people regrettably losing their lives. In the same time frame, there have been hundreds of thousands who have died because of having AIDS. So which one's the biggest threat? And you know, every day our young people, adults too, but especially our young people, are bombarded at school, in movies, in music, on TV, in the mall, in magazines, they're bombarded with 'homosexuality is normal and natural.' It's something they have to deal with every day. Fortunately we don't have to deal with a terrorist attack every day, and that's what I mean.
Shorter:
HIV/AIDS kills gay people so Im not a bad person for saying people shouldnt be gay. Im saving lives!
Well, there are lots, and lots, and lots of problems with this.
This isnt 1985*.
When you combine Sally Kerns 'HIV only kills teh homoz' meme with her insistence on non-functional abstinence only education with her denial of evolution-- Kerns sentiment contributes to heterosexual women not understanding their risk of contracting HIV, nor do they have access to/know how to use condoms to minimize that risk.
Technically, Sally Kern is very much part of The Problem when it comes to HIV/AIDS, and is helping people kill themselves and others with ignorance.
High-five there, lady.
Secondly, Im going to tell Kern the same thing I told Pope-- Their desire to 'save lives' is utterly insincere. If they genuinely wanted to use their obsession with lines in the Bible to condemn 'bad' behaviors and encourage 'good' behaviors and save lives, they would be focusing their efforts on obesity.
* Nearly 67% of Oklahoma adults are either overweight or obese
* The number is 34% for Oklahoma youth
* Overweight and obesity are associated with many health risks, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, Type 2 Diabetes, and depression
* The estimated cost associated with obesity in Oklahoma is more than $854 million each year.
* This problem affects the health of individuals, families and communities throughout the state.
Oklahomans are at increased risk of dying from heart disease, cancer, and diabetes related complications. They dont have access to fruits and vegetables. And they are not physically active (all the stats you could want here).
And gluttony is a deadly sin. (LOL! Does God tell gluttons to kill themselves in Proverbs 23:2?? LOL, WUT??)
Churches are in a perfect position in Oklahoma, as community leaders and social hubs, to be fighting the obesity epidemic in Oklahoma, and they have 'Biblical' reasons to be doing just that.
Buuuuuuuuuut they dont. They write books and give media interviews bitching about teh homos and teh coloreds, run for political offices, and hang out with Creationists.
They really care about saving lives, you see.
* From an epidemiology standpoint, we should all be on our knees thanking the male homosexual community for their HIV/AIDS losses. It was nothing more than sheer chance that they were the founder population here in the US-- thus when all these young healthy males started coming in sick, and they were gay, it really narrowed down where we had to look to find the culprit. If it had been introduced into the heterosexual population first, teh homoz would have been the protected population, and it would have been a hellovalot harder to figure out what was going on, and it would have been a hellovalot more prevalent when we finally knew where/how to look for it. HIV/AIDS could have been worse, but homosexual males bad luck saved our asses.
- Log in to post comments
techskeptic:
Except the increase in obesity in America is due to declines in exercise and high-calorie, low-nutrient processed food. All other things being equal, fat people tend to be fat because they eat poorly and exercise less. Correlation, causation, contributing factors, the relationship matters less than people eating less processed food and exercising more - which is still not what church leaders are encouraging Oklahomans to do.
Point stands.
"If it had been introduced into the heterosexual population first, teh homoz would have been the protected population,"
I'm a bit skeptical, and hadn't heard this argued before. Teach me what is being said better.
Transmission rates in gay males at the time might have been higher due to greater promiscuity was my standard thought.
Folks were pretty frisky back in the day.
I'm pretty sure gay males were not the only ones who were promiscuous and didn't often use condoms in the early 80's rork.
Although it has been established by recent events that women are never mercenary, self interested or lie about things. Back in the 80's most of us heterosexual guys protected ourselves from unwanted offspring, as we had for decades by the judicious use of a "merry widow".
As a fat lazy person who has killed more bottles of Gin than Carrie Nation's hatchet, the appropriate passage is Proverbs 23:21 aka the Dean Vernon Wormer passage.
Obesity is the product of gluttony AND indolence.
Also gin, electric grocery carts, World of Warcraft and Indian Casinos.
I knew a guy who ran a Del Rancho Drive-in franchise. Their big day is Valentine's and they had to jack hammer out the speed bumps because the morbidly obese in love kept bottoming out and cracking their axles.
The chicken fried steak sandwiches are indeed supreme.
one little problem with this:
fat people dont necessarily live shorter lives than non-fat people (barring other-not weight related issues)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110815095034.htm
In general quality of life is worse, and so are expenses
For rork's comment/question. The existence of homosexuality and heterosexuality creates two groups that would not transmit the virus sexually between them. Those who engage in sex with both genders would transfer the virus between the two, but the point is that the two groups are largely separate populations in this specific regard. It is similar to having a group of birds where half had sex at night, and half at day. A sexually transmitted disease would spread throughout one population but have difficulty spreading to the other population. It is not about promiscuity but partner selection. Right Abbie?
And how many deaths caused by religious intolerance or caused by adherence to religious ideologies? Terrorist attacks are probably just the tip of the iceberg in that respect.
By Sally's own distorted view of the world, religion is probably the biggest threat. When are you going to do something about that, Sally?
[Homosexuals] were the founder population here in the US.... [I]t really narrowed down where we had to look to find the culprit. ... [H]omosexual males bad luck saved our asses.
I don't follow your reasoning here. It makes sense to me that heteros were fortunate that the epidemic was initially confined to a relatively isolated sub-population. Are you further claiming that the discovery of treatments would have been slowed had the outbreak first occurred among heteros? If so, please elaborate. I can't make the logical leap.
Oh there you go using reliable and verifiable sources for your data. Like that's what matters. You have to get that shit in a random email chain that people's parents and grandparents forward blindly. THEN it's real.
Its funny how you can realise you know nothing about something when someone just tilts things a little.
Why was the outbreak seen in homosexuals first? I guess I just bought the promiscuity arguement, but its not enough. Condoms - of course must play a role - no need for them prior to the outbreak. I sometimes assumed it was perhaps this, that, and also the more higher likely hood of anal fissure meeting other fluids.
No one likes Sally? If it were only so. Sigh.
==
If you really want to see a load of stupid stuff then do an Internet search for "Reclaiming America For Christ" which is a conference which Rep. Kern was a speaker at.
Apologists do like to make claims such as the one seen in this article:
"The fastest growing population of individuals getting infected with HIV in 2011, all around the world, is heterosexual women."
The facts are somewhat different:
"During 2009, there were an estimated 42,959 new diagnoses of HIV infection in the 40 states and five dependent areas. Adult or adolescent males accounted for three-quarters of new HIV diagnoses. The main transmission route among males was male-to-male sexual contact (74%), "
http://www.avert.org/usa-statistics.htm
"The facts are somewhat different:"
...amazing how the world has morphed into the USA there...
eNeMeE - it's worse than that.
Vince, what do you suppose "fastest growing population " actually means, please?
I'll give you a hint - it's not the absolute number of cases... it has to do with what fraction of a cohort is infected now compared to the last time the measurement was made.
About the Bible verse, I actually found it rather interesting that Young's Literal Translation (and *only* that translation) has a very different meaning; it comes across as just saying "If you're a glutton, you're hurting yourself" rather than saying "If you're a glutton, go kill yourself."
Woden:
Yeah, noticed that. And what's with the Douay-Rheims version (never heard of that before...?) It's the only one which doesn't appear to be about gluttony. Instead, the crime appears to be having "thy soul in thy own power". Not even sure what that means, but doesn't sound like gluttony...more like "have you given yourself to God?"
jaranath @15
The Douay-Rheims translation was the Catholic translation of Jerome's vulgate into English. It was smuggled into England as a counter to the KJV.
It has its own "interesting" translation errors which the Church acknowledged about 1875 and promised to come up with a better one Real Soon - took until about 1965 or so.
But what's a century when you've been around for two millenia?
fusilier
James 2:24
techskeptic:
Except the increase in obesity in America is due to declines in exercise and high-calorie, low-nutrient processed food. All other things being equal, fat people tend to be fat because they eat poorly and exercise less. Correlation, causation, contributing factors, the relationship matters less than people eating less processed food and exercising more - which is still not what church leaders are encouraging Oklahomans to do.
Point stands.
Fusilier: Thanks! Interesting history there. Now I wanna read more!
Not only was this an awesome story, you got linked to by Dan Savage!
You guys must have DAMN BIG hoses in Oklihoma!!! :):)
"Dear Random Guy I Met At The Bar Tonight:
It's ok if we do it bareback. I know a virologist who says it's beneficial for us to shag unsheathed. Apparently, it saves lives.
Love (Or At Least Remember On The Way Out To Check My Mail),
Other Random Guy At The Bar"
I think I have a new angle for what to print on my business cards. =^_^=
DB @ 7 (sounds like a news promo!)
Consider if a virus breaks out exclusively among straight people. You have to weed through all demographics to figure out what the hell is going on, what's causing it, how it operates and what not. So, rich, white, black, poor, educated, not educated, young, old. It would seem that everyone is getting it. By having a disease that is prevalent, say, among 16 year old white males who recently traveled to a conference and got sick one night after sleeping in air conditioned rooms, you've had a lot of your work cut away from the outset.
The more precise the population originally presented, the less running around one has to do at least figure out how the hell people are getting the unknown thing killing people. Back in the day, they knew gays and IV drug users were the ones really getting it hard. And then blood transfusion and organ recipients. So, if nothing else, we at least knew it took fluid of person A getting inside person B to transmit the disease.
So, something like 100,000 patients present in a year. If they're all either gay, using IV drugs (both as was occasionally the case), recently given blood or an organ, as opposed to, say, 9,000 white mother, 6,000 black college students, 1,100 young infants greatly lets researchers focus their inquiry. Almost for free*.
*except for those pesky deaths and all.
After the cause of the 1976 outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease was found, that same legionella bacterium was found in preserved lung tissue speciemns taken from people who had died of "really nasty bacterial pneumonia" decades before the '76 outbreak.
IOW, legionella had been infecting and even killing people for quite some time before humanity ever knew of its existence. Because these were isolated cases the kind of research effort needed to isolate and identify a previously-unknown species of pathogen didn't happen.
It wasn't until a group of people who all had something clearly identifiable in common (attendance at a particular convention in a particular hotel) got bad sick at the same time that the alarm bells went off and concentrated scientific firepower was brought to bear on the question "WTF?".
HIV has a somewhat similar history. The earliest fully-documented case of HIV/AIDS datges from 1959. The virus was most likely human-adapted and circulating in Africa some two decades before that but there was no trigger for the sort of work that isolates organisms like legionella and HIV.
What set off the massive effort that identified HIV was that a group of people who all had something clearly identifiable in common (being young, sexually-active gay men) got bad sick around the same time, so that one couldn't help observing "by George, teh homoz are dying like flies. WTF?"
IN that sense, gay men were the canary in the coal mine for all of us. If the intital introduction of HIV to the Americas had been among the hetero population, not only would there have been a lot more confounding factors to sort through, as noted by Juticar above, but it could have taken much longer for anyone to realize that there was a new epidemic in town.
And it would have been more wide-spread. A silent epidemic simmering in ~5% of the population is very different than a silent epidemic simmering in ~90% of the population.
Nit-pick, here Ktesibos, but HIV-1 has been circulating in humans since ~1900s. When it was circulating in 'heteros', with a cadre of confounding factors, aka Africa, no one really noticed or knew what was going on even if they did. And then we got the HIV/AIDS bloodbath in Africa. Imagine if that had happened in the US as well, instead of 'only' in the gay population? A few overlapping generations dead? Generations of orphans?
US would be a very different place.
Gay mens bad luck saved our asses.
Not luck - a difference between normal and homosexual sexual mores. And a bit of physiology.