Bryan Fischer, a host on Christian Hate Radio sponsored by the American Patriarchy Association, recently received mail from a listener appalled at his suggestion that homosexuals ought to be imprisoned. Fischer was quick to reassure his listener that yes, he really does believe that, he will happily repeat the claim multiple times, and that you aren’t a True Christian™ if you don’t agree that homosexuals ought to be treated like murderers or slavers.
Hi!
Thanks for writing me about my comments on my program regarding homosexuality.
It might be worth noting that what I actually suggested is that we impose the same sanctions on those who engage in homosexual behavior as we do on those who engage in intravenous drug abuse, since both pose the same kind of risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. I’d be curious to know what you think should be done with IV drug abusers, because whatever it is, I think the same response should be made to those who engage in homosexual behavior.
If you believe that what drug abusers need is to go into an effective detox program, then we should likewise put active homosexuals through an effective reparative therapy program.
Secondly, I’m afraid you’re simply wrong about the Bible’s perspective on the law and homosexuality.
Paul lists quite explicitly in 1 Timothy 1:8-11 the actions and behaviors that are the proper concern of the law:
“Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine…”
The bottom line here is that, biblically, those “who practice homosexuality” should come under the purview of the law just as much as those who take people captive in order to sell them into slavery.
You express a belief in the Scriptures, and I trust your confidence in Scripture is not selective. If you believe all Scripture is inspired, then you are compelled to accept that legal sanctions may appropriately be applied to those who engage in homosexual behavior.
Thank you for contacting us, and I hope this response will help you think in a thorough and biblical way about this important social issue.
Bryan Fischer
Host, “Focal Point” radio program on AFR Talk, a division of the American Family Association
Well, gosh. His analogy is so powerful that I think we ought to take all the heterosexuals who carry sexually transmitted diseases and subject them to sex aversion therapy (I think it involves a car battery, a couple of cables with clamps, and a porn video) and prolonged jail time. The ones who have the diseases should be made to suffer even more, and while they may be in the minority, the disgust we feel at these infected pariahs should be extended to all who practice the sloppy, fluid sharing, slimy business of male/female sex.
I’ve got some old Biblical misogynist to back me up, too. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, says “It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” That’s clear: you should be celibate. The only reason to marry is if you can’t contain your own lustful urges, which are wicked, so that you aren’t fornicating. Sex is dirty, so perhaps an even better solution would be to jail everyone who practices it. That will keep them even purer than marriage.
Ouch. I need to stop trying to think like these guys—it hurts my brain. I think I need to lie down for a bit now to recover.
Now I wake up in the mornings, and think about what a wasted life I lead
funny, I was just thinking the same thing about you.
@492: I donate regularly in the UK. Of course they test the blood, and will contact the donor if they see anything nasty. They also have advice in big big letters saying DO NOT DONATE IN ORDER TO GET A BLOOD TEST- they don’t want the system overloaded with risky donations; and the questionnaire prescreens for risk factors so as to reduce the likelihood of getting risky donations. Yes, the questionnaire is a little old-fashioned and biased; they do bar any MSM, but for hets they bar on prostitution but not on one-night stands, as you say. That could probably be improved. In general though I think they’re quite resistant to removing restrictions. Even as a regular donor I have to negotiate with them almost every time and refer to the atlas to show that my birthplace (kwaZulu-Natal) doesn’t make me a malaria risk.
Yawn, Fuckosaurus keeps missing our points. We don’t give a shit what he has to say. He is a pathetic loser, who keeps hammering home that point with every inane and insane post. We recognized that from earliest posts, and he just ignores reality, living in his own world of delusions. Just like any creobot/godbot/racist.
@Miki Z 492:
Annoyingly, I’m banned from giving blood, too because my father was stationed in Germany from the time I was 4 to the time I was 8. Some kind of Mad Cow Disease thing going on then.
It seems like if you’re at any sort of risk, they’d rather just nip it there than have you go through the donation, test the blood, and dump it because it’s bad. It kind of sucks, though, because it’s one of those things that I want to do, and have wanted to do, but I can’t.
I do wonder how they decide these kind of things. I’m not a statistician, but I have done some of this type of cutoff analysis in other contexts. The prevalence of bad blood has to be really high for the presumptive exclusion to be good policy on economic grounds.
The prevalence of bad blood doesn’t have to be very high for presumptive exclusion to be good policy if you expect the public to accept routine blood transfusions. It’s less an economic issue than one of both public acceptance and medical ethics. And recall that no test is perfect; if there’s a lot of bad blood coming in some of it will start to get past the tests. Nobody wants that.
A year or two back, I ran into a really counterproductive, homophobic set of blood donation rules. The Arizona Red Cross was banning any man who had had sex with another man since 1977, even if it was 20 years ago and he had repeated negative tests for HIV. However, a woman who had had sex with an HIV+ man was only banned for 12 months.
That only makes sense if they have evidence that the HIV virus can lurk, undetected, in a man’s bloodstream for years, but will always produce antibodies in a woman within 12 months.
If “sex with any man since 1977” is a risk, sex with a man known to have HIV in that time is also a risk. It’s not as though male-to-female transmission of HIV is incredibly rare.
This is not going to protect the blood supply. If they are so short of donors that they have to accept women with HIV+ lovers in the relatively recent past, they are overdue for reconsidering the ban on men who have sex with men.
I emailed to ask them about this, and never heard back.
v.rosenzweig — That “1977” rule is not just Arizona’s, but the Food and Drug Administration’s. I’d forgotten it was that ridiculous.
But don’t cry for me. – frankosaurus
I wasn’t about to: I save my compassion for those who aren’t complete and utter shits.
Knockgoats, I asked perfectlysafe what his point is and he referred me to his endless list of posts, basically leaving me to come to my own conclusion, based on my experience and his words. – Timberwoof
He had made his point quite clearly, numerous times. Why should he make it again for every one of the numerous people shrieking “Homophobe! Bigot!” at him in relay? You were too fucking lazy and sure of your own virtue to check out his first post, and what it was a response to, and now you’re too much of a moral coward to admit you were wrong and apologise, unlike the admirable aratina cage.
Knockgoats: I argued at 447 that perfectlysafe’s claims are not defensible. Since he seems to have left, do you have any comment? His first claim seems to have been that “The reason why male homosexuals are at higher risk of stds than other groups is because a) anal sex poses a significantly higher risk of disease transmission than other forms of sex and b) man-man is the only gender combination in which each sexual partner can penetrate the other.” That’s not defensible at all; on a flat reading it claims that male homosexuals have a higher risk than any other group, even sub-Saharan prostitutes; seems unlikely.
Stephen Wells (#447)
I don’t understand how you can still be saying things like that I am comparing “risk stats for MSM versus everyody else” while I’ve typed out the words “heterosexual anal sex and homosexual anal sex” so many times that I’m thinking of using it as a password. Nor, in light of that, can I fathom why you’re asking me to take into account risky vaginal sex.
As I explained in my last post to you, if you’re doing a comparison of the relative risk between heterosexual anal sex and homosexual anal sex, then you have to do a like for like comparison. Certainly, lifetime monogamous homosexual couples are at less overall risk than a crack whore and her pimp, but showing that demonstrates only that behaviour has a huge impact on overall risk.
Now, in my last post, I also explained to you that a like for like analysis considers promiscuity levels to be equal. I gave you the information you needed to understand that I wasn’t conflating anything. And now you’re coming back to me and telling me that you’ll “take my word for it” (which, incidentally, you shouldn’t do) and then go on to make the same assertion again. Are you expecting me to reexplain it for you? Promiscuity isn’t actually a binary thing ANYWAY – it’s more like a sliding scale – so…who do you judge to be promiscuous and who not?
In terms of examining the general proposition “heterosexuals do anal too!” as an argument, it does no good to come back with “well some homosexuals are okay! Just not the promiscuous ones!”. It really doesn’t.
Your apparent contention that there’s no interaction between group A and group B is false and the fact that you’re dividing them at all is an arbitrary judgement about “promiscuity.Your attempt to suggest that the only men who take a versatile role are also promiscuous is either simplistic or dishonest.
No, but you can form a better argument based on people’s behaviour, which is what I’ve been proposing. Homosexual men demonstrate a far better attitude towards STD prevention than heterosexuals. This can be demostrated statistically. The behaviour of homosexual men actually makes them safer than heterosexuals right now. Do you see? Similarly, if a craze for dry vaginas sweeps through the world of heterosexuality, then you can argue “heterosexuals actively pursue more dangerous sex”.
I have gone into this “what people might do” business before and have no desire to do so again. You can either work it out for yourself or assume that I’m mean or wrong or whatever. Up to you.
It absolutely should not matter how it sounded, especially not here. You need to have a really good think about what it is you’re actually saying to me here, because plenty of the people who are “not popular here” think that the way something sounds is much more important than the content, and they get blasted for it.
Oh, and that super subtle point you’re trying to make? You have drawn me in – I am oblivious. I SHALL WAIT FOR YOU TO SPRING YOUR TRAP.
Stephen Wells (#511)
Are you seriously saying that you think I meant that there is literally nothing you can do that puts you at greater risk with regard to STDs than “being a homosexual”? You’re just quote mining at this point. I’ve gone into WHY that works the way it does at length in this thread. From #396:
“Let me try to explain this from, say, the HIV virus’ perspective, and therefore hopefully illustrate further what I’ve been saying about increased risk. When HIV infects someone with a penis then it’s got a great deal of mobility. If that penis ends up in someone else’s butt, then the virus gets a good chance of being transferred. If that butt happened to belong to a woman, then it’s a bit stuck. It has to wait for another man to come along and then really rather struggle to infect the man. If it succeeds, then it’s back on high risk status.
However, if the butt in question happens to be that of a man, then it potentially has the chance to be high risk straight away, because the man has a penis that could, depending on his preferences, go into a butt or a vagina, and, as already discussed, it’s massively easier to go from penis to butt/vagina than the other way around (6.5/10,000 anus – penis, 50/10,000 penis -> anus are the stats that I’ve been using, although you may feel free to challenge if you think that these are wildly off or somehow misleading). So there is at least the possibility that the virus can eliminate one of the steps that is completely unavoidable if it’s stuck inside a heterosexual woman, whether she does anal or not.”
I obviously meant “group” in terms of gender pairing groups. You continue to go by how things sound, Stephen.
perfectlysafe: “Let me try to explain this from, say, the HIV virus’ perspective, and therefore hopefully illustrate further what I’ve been saying about increased risk. When HIV infects someone with a penis then it’s got a great deal of mobility. If that penis ends up in someone else’s butt, then the virus gets a good chance of being transferred. [etc]”
But it’s not about the penis, it’s about body fluids exchange (specifically, infected fluid entering the blood stream).
You might equally well have written “When HIV infects someone with a
penisvagina then it’s got a great deal of mobility. If thatpenisvagina ends upinaround someone else’sbuttpenis, then the virus gets a good chance of being transferred.”You seriously think an infected gay man is more problematic than an infected prostitute?
I grant that anal sex is more likely to involve access to the blood than vaginal sex, but surely the larger issues are unprotected promiscuity and carelessness/neglect by those infected — much more so than the type of sexual intercourse.
Stephen Wells@511,
It seems perfectlysafe hasn’t left, and is quite capable of explaining and defending his points, if people will actually bother to read what he’s written. In fact, I suspect he’s worked in the area of AIDS epidemiology at some time, and knows more about it that than anyone else taking part in the conversation. I intervened only because I’ve been posting here long enough that most other regulars, whether they like or agree with me or not, are unlikely to think I’ve suddenly become a raging homophobe, or have been successfully hiding my homophobia for two years – and hence might actually reconsider their kneejerk responses to perfectlysafe.
on a flat reading it claims that male homosexuals have a higher risk than any other group, even sub-Saharan prostitutes; seems unlikely
Stephen, Stephen, how dare you lump all sub-Saharan prostitutes together like that, as if they were a homogeneous population? Male and female, adult and juvenile, urban and rural, part-time and full-time, and no doubt including well-groomed, sophisticated and expensive specialists who only have sex with rich foreigners, and always insist on use of a condom.
But it’s not about the penis, it’s about body fluids exchange (specifically, infected fluid entering the blood stream).
You might equally well have written “When HIV infects someone with a penis vagina then it’s got a great deal of mobility. -John Morales
Sorry, John, but that’s just ignorance. It is a consensus among the relevant scientific experts that it is much easier for HIV to pass from the “penetrator” to the “penetratee” than vice versa – that’s a much bigger difference than that between vaginal and anal sex – which are, nonetheless, also significantly different. Hence, if some members of a population act as both penetrator and penetratee on different occasions, it is easier for the virus to spread through such a population under any given set of other conditions, because it can get from person 1 to person 2 to person 3… to person n, always passing from penetrator to penetratee. As far as I can see, that argument is absolutely sound. Perfectlysafe has repeatedly stressed that behaviour, and in particular condom use, is key, that the comparisons he’s making are other things being equal, and that he’s concerned to prevent people using a faulty argument agains “Teh geys are to blame”, vis “straights do anal too!”, particualarly when there’s a sound argument to be used instead: gays are now on average much more educated about the risks and how to avoid them than straights.
John Morales (#513)
No. because:
“it’s massively easier to go from penis to butt/vagina than the other way around (6.5/10,000 anus – penis, 50/10,000 penis -> anus are the stats that I’ve been using, although you may feel free to challenge if you think that these are wildly off or somehow misleading).”.
You would need a lot more information to compare who would actually be more problematic, and it rather depends on what “problematic” means. The prostitute would have to have much more sex than the man in order to have the same probability of transmission, though.
Receptive anal has a transfer rate of roughly five times that of receptive vaginal.
It has sort of been my point throughout most of the thread that behaviour is more important, but I have been talking about baseline risk with regard to a theoretical issue earlier in the thread.
Knockgoats, once again, thank you.
Sorry, re above, the rates for vagina-penis and penis-vagina are 5/10,000 and 10/10,000 respectively.
This is particularly nasty when the leader of the opposition in Malaysia, whose party deprived the ruling party of their 2/3 majority, is currently being tried on charges of sodomy, which carry a hefty 20-year prison sentence. There’s no known evidence for such activity, just someone’s unsupported word. What a handy way to get rid of your political opponents! It’s not something I want in the arsenal of the dirty-tricks gang.
If we want to start out with demonstrated harm then we can start with drunk drivers and give them some aversion therapy and prison time.
For the next target of the war on drugs I nominate alcohol, which does more damage than illegal drugs by working its constant attrition against larger numbers of people. Legalizing the other drugs would drop their price and massively reduce the crime that buys them. When you meet someone who won’t even think about legalizing them, ask how long he’s been in the pocket of organized crime.
And for subduing the class most likely to use violence, I suggest a curfew on men.
Stephen Wells@506:
No, I agree that nobody wants that. My objection is mathematical in nature: if the blood not excluded were more likely to be ‘safe’ than the blood excluded, it would be perfectly rational from a medical perspective to presumptively exclude blood. My curiosity is if there is any evidence that this is the case, or if the exclusion rules are based on keeping out ‘icky’ people.
For instance: IV drug users and unlicensed prostitutes probably have a higher incidence of blood which ought to be rejected, but regulated prostitutes and professional porn stars have a lower incidence of STDs than the general population, at least in the U.S., due to both strict monitoring and professional incentives.
KG:
Perhaps it is just ignorance. I’ve been in a monogamous heterosexual relationship for over 30 years now, and don’t actively pursue information on this field.
I just wonder — how do bodily tissues know which is the “penetrator” and which is the “penetratee”? As I said, I thought it was about infected fluid getting into the blood.
Can you provide references for this claim?
perfectlysafe,
I’m not questioning the relative risk of differing intimate activities, what I’m raising is: how would you rate the relative risks of those (done with awareness and protection) in toto as compared with those of such activitiy done without? Of those risks, is whether the vector is male or female more significant than whether the vector uses protection (or abstains) or otherwise?
Finally, your claim singles out males over females, AFAIT, moreso than homosexuals/bisexuals over heterosexuals, as the salient factor; yet it is male homosexuality regarding which you’ve express concern.
Okay, perfectlysafe: if your point is that male-male anal sex is particularly risky, in re. HIV transmission, compared to male-female or female female sex in general, that is not particularly controversial. And if that is the only point you were trying to make, I’m not clear why it needed making at such length.
What you said back @93, however, was that “male homosexuals are at greater risk of STD transmission compared with other groups”, on the grounds of the anal sex transmission risk factor. And I still honestly do not see how you can justify that. Greater risk than anyone who isn’t a male homosexual? If you’re talking about a theoretical, hypothetical case in which everyone is equally promiscuous and equally partaking in anal sex, that is not a useful case to consider since it doesn’t describe real behaviour; and if you’re talking about real groups you haven’t specified enough about real behaviours to justify the statement. For example you’ve quoted risk factors for transmission _per sexual encounter_, but without information on frequency of sexual encounters that doesn’t let you calculate a real risk, and an assumption of equal frequencies doesn’t seem realistic so would not tell you anything useful about real populations.
Incidentally, I think it’s unfair that you ding me for going by how things “sound”, but also think it should be obvious that you meant something that wasn’t clearly stated.
Can you respond to this in a way that doesn’t assume I am accusing you personally of homophobia and which doesn’t consist of a restatement of the transmission risk per encounter, which is not the controversial issue? I honestly want to clear this up.
Do we actually have inconsistent meanings of risk here? Should I parse the original statement of “male homosexuals are at greater risk” as “male homosexuals are potentially at greater risk”? You’ve just posted that current behaviours in STD prevention make male homosexuals safer than hets right now; isn’t that the opposite of the earlier statement?
I just wonder — how do bodily tissues know which is the “penetrator” and which is the “penetratee”? John Morales
Oh FFS, think about it! When a man ejaculates inside whatever bodily orifice of their partner, if they are not using a condom, or it leaks or slips off, at least some of the semen stays within that orifice.
Can you provide references for this claim?
I already did@217.
Incidentally, I think it’s unfair that you ding me for going by how things “sound”, but also think it should be obvious that you meant something that wasn’t clearly stated. – Stephen Wells
It’s not in the least obvious: I understood it first time, @93. As for “unfair”, you’ve got a fucking nerve. While you haven’t joined the mob yelling “homophobe”, you have consistently ignored what perfectlysafe has repeatedly made clear.
which doesn’t consist of a restatement of the transmission risk per encounter, which is not the controversial issue? I honestly want to clear this up.
I don’t believe you, because perfectlysafe has made clear time and again what his points are, as have I, and you’ve ignored us both. I’m not going to reiterate them yet again, as there’s absolutely no reason to believe you will behave any differently this time.
Knockgoats, once again, thank you. – perfectlysafe
No problem – my SIWOTI syndrome made me do it!
John Morales (#521)
Taking proper precautions is far, far more important than what specifically you’re doing sexually.
The only think that I’ve “expressed concern” over in this thread is that people use good arguments rather than bad ones (and even then, not so much “concern” as “Nooo! That’s not right! I must intervene!” [or SIWOTI, indeed]). I’m afraid that otherwise I don’t really understand what you’ve written here.
Stephen Wells (#_#)
No, that wasn’t my point, Stephen. And do you know, I’m not actually going to tell you what my point was, because Knockgoats has summarised it far better than I ever could a few posts up and I have been expressing it throughout the thread.
But you’re right to complain. I have been spamming this thread with the same information over and over when people had been saying to me “well, that’s completely fucking obvious! Why are you telling us this again?”. And yet I KEEP DOING IT. Why? I must just love the look of my own font.
I’m afraid, Stephen, that while you continue to cling to the idea, after all that I’ve said, that I was making a comment about the actual behaviour of homosexual men rather than showing why a particular comparative argument is weak, you will continue to struggle with this. And here’s the problem from my point of view – I’ve been consistent in what I’m saying. You, on the other hand, keep jumping around. Promiscuity was a burning issue for you previously, for example, but no mention if it now. I think I know why promiscuity was an issue for you, but you never actually say what your point is, so I can’t engage with it. All in all, you just seem to be galloping out whatever “issues” you can based on what you think I’ve been saying, trying to catch me out rather than trying to understand. I’m beyond expecting you to actually engage with what I have said at this point.
I question your ability to accurately judge what is fair and unfair, Stephen. I don’t think that you’re very good at it.
I shall try to prevent my knee from jerking just this once, Stephen. I don’t actually think that I have been thinking that you’re accusing me of homophobia, and I wouldn’t care at this point if you were. But you have apparently taken the rather irritating attitude that it is my duty to lead you, personally, one step at a time, to an understanding of what I’ve been saying, while you splutter and hiss and try to look anywhere other than where I’m pointing. I have written thousands of words in this thread effectively explaining my original post, some of them directly to you, and here you are, asking for an explanation of my original post, while simultaneously complaining that I appear to have written rather a lot in this thread. You are being tedious and obtuse.
Also, whenever I read your posts I imagine them being read in the voice of a small, fat boy with a mouth full of gobstoppers. Don’t ask me why. But that doesn’t help either.
What is the distinction between risk and potential risk? You’re asking me if I was talking about things that are possible or possibly possible? “Risk” is a word that only has meaning in context; in the context of what I was saying in #93 it could only refer to the base risk of STD transmission compounded by the ability, unique to homosexual men, to role switch. If you are interpreting risk to mean a specific kind of risk, then that’s possibly (or, more to the point, there is potentially a risk that it is possibly) hobbling your ability to understand.
The thing that I’ve been saying throughout the thread? Yeah, I said that AGAIN. I just like the way it sounds.
No. Saying “the sensible precautions taken by homosexual men [in the US] mitigates the inherent risk to the extent that they are at less actual risk of STD transmission than heterosexuals” does not contradict the statement “homosexual men are at higher risk of STD transmission” because the earlier statement referred to baseline risk (not explicitly stated in the original post, but that’s the only thing that it could have meant in the context of that post). So apples and oranges. Or at least satsumas and oranges. Once again, I feel that you would understand this already if you weren’t actively looking for things that I’ve said that are “bad”.
Anyway, if your interest is, in fact, genuine, then I feel like I would be restricting your ability to understand by continuing to indulge your apparent desire for me to spoonfeed this to you. So best of luck, Stephen.
Stephen,
Perhaps if you – or anyone – wrote this out in mathematical form…?
Quit conflating the risk of HIV transmission with the the risk of STD transmission, and especially, quit conflating HIV with STDs in general. Not even Bryan Fischer made that mistake.
“Baseline risk” is begging the question: what is the baseline?
To calculate a person’s risk of infection, you have to know what activities they are engaging in, what the risk of transmitting any given microbe is via those activities, and what the existing infection rate is. Not all populations are interchangeable in this regard. It doesn’t matter how theoretically risky an act is, if you isolate three, or six, or 100 uninfected people and let them engage in it until the cows come home, they aren’t going to infect each other.
It’s easy to reason in circles here, to make things look either more or less risky: “none of my friends have HIV, so it’s perfectly okay for us to have sex with lots of people without barriers” (theory and practice: can you be sure none of those people is having sex with someone who has HIV or another STD?) or “the transmission rate of HIV from that kind of sex is 1%, so I’d better not do it, even with condoms and a partner who has repeatedly tested HIV- and has no other partners.”
This is quite funny: Knockgoats is very insistent that perfectlysafe has made his point very clearly, so clearly that he will not repeat it again, and perfectlysafe now tells me that knockgoats has made his point for him very clearly, so clearly that he will not repeat it.
I on the other hand am perfectly willing to restate my point once more and without any knee-jerking or political overtone. The fact claim “male homosexuals are at higher risk of STD transmission than other groups” , call it claim 1, is not justified by the fact claim “male homosexuals can be both the penetrator and the penetratee in anal sex”, claim 2; 1 does not follow from 2. Why not? Because to calculate the actual risk due to this risky behaviour (promiscuous switching), you need to multiply together the proportion of male homosexuals that are actually prone to this activity, factor 1, and the frequency with which they do so, factor 2, and the risk associated with each occurrence, factor 3, which is the only actual figure that perfectlysafe has provided. Without factors 1 and 2, however, you can’t calculate the actual risk to the group, and without similar factors for “other groups” you can’t calculate their risks either. And you absolutely cannot assume that “all else being equal” means that you can use only factor 3.
I sincerely hope you’re just pretending to be confused about “risk” versus “potential risk”. I have a knife on my belt which I use for peeling oranges. If I started lightly stabbing myself and others that would be a massive risk for transmission of various blood borne diseases (and of course for death by stabbing). But that is only a potential risk, which I would run if I engaged in that behaviour. Since I never do go around stabbing people (only oranges), my actual risk of stab-wound disease transmission is zero (assuming nobody else stabs me, of course).
Being _physically capable_ of behaviour X does not expose me to the risks of behaviour X if I never actually engage in behaviour X.
perfectlysafe,
That, for me, is the crux.
It’s good to see that 300 posts after I pointed out and linked to the relevant studies that HIV transmission is a multifactorial business and not a matter of homo vs hetero or cock vs pussy, we still get moronic comments like
Maybe this applies to sex between strangers.And I say maybe because as I pointed out way upthread, it might be exquisitely more dangerous in terms of HIV transmission to have vanilla missionary vaginal sex with a beautiful stranger with Chlamydia then to have the butsexs with a healthy individual of any sex.
Stephen Wells,
You are just being a fucking jerk. If you can’t or won’t understand the point when it’s been made 20 times, why would you understand it when it’s made the 21st? I have no more to say to you for the time being.
I have no reason to suppose that “the point” has been made once, let alone twenty times. I have seen about twenty repetitions of the claim that “the point” has been made; that is not the same thing. Possibly some form of reference, such as “as X said in post number Y…” and a little ctrl-c ctrl-v would help?
I’ve been posting here long enough that you should know I am susceptible to rational argument and am capable of admitting error when I’m wrong. “the point” appears to involve a claim that A is the case because of B, when A does not follow from B. That’s problematic to me.