Note: As an editorial follow up, and to clarify I offer this initial statement. It is clear that I have an agenda. Anyone who writes anything from their heart has one, even the most neutral of journalists do. What I hope I've pointed out with the below ramblings, is that you have to at least make *some* effort at understanding complex issues before you form opinions of them.
I noted with a bit of irony during a discussion of "values" on a social networking service that most people take their convictions and project them onto the facts around them, rather than use factual truths to develop their convictions. This isn't a new revelation however, just one that has come up quite a lot recently in my discussion with others.
One of the most important principles to live by, in my view, is intellectual honesty. What this does is force one to not only be critical of answers but to also be critical of their own questions. Many people mistakenly get this wrong.
As an example, the SNS network discussion thread was one that started about hatred and the reasons behind it. It then (almost naturally) slid into a discussion about personal beliefs and morality, and inevitably to the question of homosexuality. One respondent made a comment about how homosexuals should just keep to themselves, and then spoke about and linked a statistic from WebMD about the high levels of HIV infections present in the gay community.
What it seemed the respondent was trying to do, and I could be mistaken, was to make some sort of causal link appear between sin, homosexuality, and HIV infection rates. While most who read my blog would probably conclude that I'm firm in my conviction that "sin" is a man-made concept (and a particularly aggregious one), I'm open minded enough to entertain as to whether someone's arguments indicate causality.
One truism of intellectual honesty is that correlation does NOT equal causation. The way intellectual inquiry is supposed to work is like this. You come up with an assertion, say for instance "is bacon bad for you?" What do you do next? The seemingly logical answer would be to find proof that bacon can be bad, but THIS IS WRONG.
In order to guard against our own innate biases, we have to approach an inquiry from the other side and, in my stupid example (because bacon is clearly awesome!!! :D), search for evidence to the CONTRARY. Truths only arise when we eliminate all other possibilities, INCLUDING the fact that we might be deceiving ourselves.
The historical linkage between HIV and homosexuality is tenuous when you look at the larger picture. When you *do* take the time to look at more than one statistic that fits in to your world view what you find is a complex problem with some simple root causes. For instance, though it may be true that, at least according to WebMD, perhaps nearly 1 in 5 homosexual males in the United States is HIV positive, this statistic does not play out consistently everywhere else in the world. Worldwide most people infected by HIV are heterosexual women, with the largest growing group being a tossup between heterosexual females and children (depending on where you get your statistics from, the numbers are very close). More than 68% of all HIV cases worldwide are in Sub-Saharan Africa.
On the surface of this, it seems we have a quandry. In our country HIV cases are dominated by homosexual males, whereas elsewhere in the world they are the abject minority. Why is this? What is the common thread?
As we've dealt with the HIV situation for decades now, the common thread is now quite well known and borne out through countless statistical and lineal regression studies. It all comes down to irresponsible sexual behavior. The reasons why these behaviors play out differently in different places in the world are a little complex, but the general gist revolves around religion, cultural acceptance, and cultural exclusion. For instance, in sub saharan africa condom use is almost unheard of, because the Catholic Church vehemently opposes all forms of contraception and has vast power in the region. This stance results in many tragedies, not the least of which is the return to the days of centuries past as nearly 1/4th of the women in the region die from the complications of childbirth, a phenomenon that is far more rare in western countries. Despite the strong religiosity in a country like ours, we thankfully do not always get our precepts about public health from 2000 year old books that were not about medicine and biology.
In America, the situation is similar but plays out very differently due to our vastly superior healthcare, a society largely distracted from the hardships of day to day life experienced elsewhere in the world, coupled with an entirely different set of social taboo's as they relate to sexuality. To those who think America has all the answers, one need only remind oneself of some cruel statistics. We have the highest teen pregnancy rates in the western world, rates that exceed more than half of 3rd world nations. Our education system ranks right up there with such scholarly peers as Turkey and Bosnia, a statistic we should be ashamed of. School systems are only allowed (when they buy in to federal money for their sex ed programs) to teach abstinance. More often than not these programs (and I've witnessed this stupidity in my own daughters sex ed curriculum) spread misinformation and falsehoods to scare teens into abstinance, a practice that clearly isn't working and is morally reprehensible!
Our approach to sex, sexual identity, and sexual responsibility in this nation has created a perfect storm of sorts. Those who are outside of the politically correct (and morally bankrupt) parochial concepts of heterosexual marriage are marginalized and institutionally given bad advice. This is why those outside of our false sense of normality (teens, the unwed, homosexuals) end up being the recipients of life's ills. This is not to say that these are excuses for 15 year old girls to get pregnant and be happy for WIC and Foodstamps, or excuses for gay males to engage in promiscuous behavior (a behavior that is clearly more driven by being MALE than being GAY).
What it does clearly indicate is this. We have to stop treating sex like it's dirty, immoral, unnatural, and unnecessary. Sex is clearly a need in our lives, and one that is necessary for us to live and live well. The fact that wearing a simple condom, the likes of which have existed for THOUSANDS OF YEARS, makes sex about as dangerous as going to Gamestop in the mall, is a fact we need to embrace collectively. This was a well known fact to the likes of Cleopatra, and was old news 2100 years ago when she used contraception. To those that pretend contraception is a consequence of modern depravity or other such nonsense, well you're just ignorant and denying the truth. Sorry.
People can reliably believe in the wrong things, not only as individuals but collectively, and these wrong beliefs can reliably lead to unnecessary human suffering. Anyone, anywhere in the world, suffering for any reason is reason enough to question your own convictions.
Morally convicting people of what they think and feel is known as a thought crime, and something that humanity has to get rid of. The Nazi's did this. Stalin did this. Some organized religions are still doing this. We have far better issues to be ethically concerned about than people's orgasms and how they obtain them. It's time we grew up.
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