Shades of Patient Zero
From today's NYTimes, self explanatory for CUIIers:
"Gay men do not have the right to spread a debilitating and often fatal disease," said Charles Kaiser, a historian and author of "The Gay Metropolis." "A person who is H.I.V.-positive has no more right to unprotected intercourse than he has the right to put a bullet through another person's head," he said.
Reactions, anyone. I won't spoil it for you by putting mine on the main page.
"Gay men do not have the right to spread a debilitating and often fatal disease," said Charles Kaiser, a historian and author of "The Gay Metropolis." "A person who is H.I.V.-positive has no more right to unprotected intercourse than he has the right to put a bullet through another person's head," he said.
Reactions, anyone. I won't spoil it for you by putting mine on the main page.
posted by Michael Barany at 4:05 PM
8 Comments:
Endemic of the 9/11 neocon culture of fear. Public health, typhoid mary, and such. The Times' portrayal of this as a debate about civil liberties vs. public health pretends that homophobia doesn't exist. Everybody should read the article Greg published last summer.
Luukas makes a good point. Information and consent can't be ignored, lest we legitimize rape, poison, etc.
True, Alex. But, of course, Crystal Meth and Internet hookups are not gay phenomena. It's still very dangerous to frame it in that context, just as AIDS itself was fist framed in the gay context. Let's not fall into the Bush->Apocalypse game just yet. I'm more worried about a bunch of junior senators/ideologues who, at present (to paraphrase Obama) can't even find their way to the bathroom yet.
Michael
In that case, of course, there wouldn't be an article. Heroin users are rarely worth tokenizing, and prostitutes do fill a token niche but it's not related to disease.
slightly off-topic, but if you saw the most recent Simpson's episode (tonight's in fact) about gay marriage, the show actually had an advisory that ran something like:
This program contains discussion of same-sex marriages. Parental discretion is advised.
I think our culture never lost its homophobia Alex.
in light of all this:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=14&u=/ap/20050220/ap_on_he_me/aids_list_e_mail
Bravo Greg! I must admit that when I saw "neoliberalism" I immediately thought about how it is framed in an economic context (not Locke and Mill but Ricardo and Smith). My geography professor from last fall, Eric Sheppard, from what I understand, has been a leading critic of what he (and/or his friends/predecessors) coined as neoliberal economics--i.e. the free trade Bretton Woods regime with its NAFTAs, ILOs, WTOs, and World Banks (wow, that's a long sentence). The link to AIDS, I believe, comes best from the international aid/loan programs and structural adjustment--or the forcible governmental reorganization of a nation in exchange for funds. As many of you are aware, the African continent is a major beneficiary from such loans. The policies carried with them, including shrinking central government functions, allowing US manufacturers open access to markets (think Big Pharma and HIV cocktails), extending patent protections, and generally subordinating oneself to the west. These are all policies which, in my view, exacerbate the AIDS crisis in Africa--the other token victim. Economic neoliberalism also, however, plays into the US/gay/AIDS system. It is through this sort of tokenization that we ("we") have been sated with abjected poverty classes from throughout the world. Economic justice and the calculus of life and dollars thereby becomes superior to social justice. Worse, the Social Right (much lamented in previous comments) gains a deeper sense of righteousness through such economic mission-work and can safely ignore suffering in their own midst.
Beware the impulse to universalize. The fact that Kaiser didn't just say "men" or "people" is more important than the fact that he could have said it. But before you say that we'd all agree that killing is bad you have to put killing in context, hence the sodomy->AIDS->death trope.
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