Liberals made up heterosexual AIDS because they hate Jesus. And here I was thinking that we made it up because we hated heterosexuals. Thanks, Dennis Prager!
In the midst of a column complaining, predictably, about how liberals insist on making all their silly "jobs" about "beliefs" and "ideology" (whereas a conservative has never occupied any position of employment and done so with an ideological bent, as such a possibility is both factually impossible and would cause good Christian-hearted heads to explode upon the mere consideration of the idea), Prager busts out this chestnut:
Even the natural sciences are increasingly subject to being rendered a means to a “progressive” end. There was the pseudo-threat of heterosexual AIDS in America -- science manipulated in order to de-stigmatize AIDS as primarily a gay man’s disease and to increase funding for AIDS research.
The "myth" of heterosexual AIDS is a rather concentrated obsession on the right, largely out of a belief that it's being manufactured in order to hide the real dirty gay homosexual secret that they create HIV just by breathing, like how a plant produces pollen or GM produces too many cars. Heterosexuals constitute thirty-one percent of new HIV cases - not heterosexuals having hot gay sex, but heterosexuals having boring-ass plain old dude-and-lady sex. (Amanda's podcast also talked about this recently.)
The line comes from old-school wingnut Michael Fumento's The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics, a Regnery-published tract that bravely pushes the idea that something conservatives don't like (in this case, the fact that HIV/AIDS is a disease that isn't limited to the evils of homosexuality, but instead has the potential to affect all of us) is simply a lie perpetuated by apostate conservatives and muddle-headed liberals.
If this sounds familiar, it's because it's the explanation for every single thing movement conservatives haven't liked since Reagan. Global warming? Check. Evolution? Check. Labor unions? Check. Underage sex not causing your junk to wither off and die? Check. The Constitution? Check.
What's so dangerous and hateful about this is that it isn't just focused on the idea that having HIV/AIDS makes you a bad person. It's that having HIV/AIDS makes you a bad person, and as such, heterosexuals can't be a part of the group that constitutes "bad people". There is no argument based on the actual incidence of the disease, but instead the insistence that heterosexuals aren't really getting HIV/AIDS at all - a stance which, if believed, actually puts heterosexuals at far greater risk of getting it in the first place. Zealots throughout history have maintained that the blood of the righteous cannot be shed by the infidels, and they've all done it standing on the graves of their compatriots.
