Does Accepting Homosexuality Curb the Spread of HIV?
by Paul Cameron, Kirk Cameron and Kay Proctor, American Thinker:
In 1981, a flush of gay infections announced the American AIDS epidemic. A debate ensued: should homosexuality be suppressed by closing gay bars and baths, outlawing homosexual activity, and rigorously enforcing laws against public sex, etc., thus dampening opportunities for homosexuals to spread the disease? Or should it be mainstreamed by “reducing discrimination” – passing LGBT legal protections, admitting gay activists into positions of power, etc. – and hence provide incentives for homosexuals to voluntarily help society and themselves by “being careful”?
In 1989, the National Research Council agreed with gay leaders that discrimination was the major “social barrier to prevention” and thus “causing” the spread of HIV among gays. It recommended mainstreaming homosexuality to curb HIV’s spread (1). Subsequently, a bevy of LGBT rights laws and court rulings has transformed the U.S. into a homosexual-friendly society. The same government that in 1950 called gays “perverts,” by 2016, said they were a valued “sexual minority.”
In China, homosexuality was vigorously suppressed when the country instituted its one-child policy in 1978-80. Given China’s culture and size, the one-child limit set the stage for a flood of men without women (perhaps 24 to 33 million in 2016 [2]). China decriminalized homosexual acts in 1997 and delisted homosexuality as a “mental illness” in 2001, around the time some of its “surplus males” took up homosexuality. Confronted with growing HIV IHH infections among gays, China partially suppressed homosexuality, forbidding its promotion and refusing to grant LGBT rights.
Still, gays in China went from constituting 1% of new HIV sufferers in 1990-2001 under “hard suppression” to 27% under “soft suppression” in 2015. The proportion of gay male infections accelerated in 2005 and surpassed IV drug abusers as the second largest group of HIV carriers in 2011. By comparison, homosexual males constituted 29% of new U.S. HIV infections in 1998 (3), and somewhere between 66% and 69% in 2013 (4). Both countries recorded close to 30,000 new gay male HIV infections in 2015.
All countries impacted by HIV have worked to suppress the spread of AIDS. Their various containment strategies effectively constitute a natural 35-year experiment involving dozens of governments, billions of people, and hundreds of prevention schemes. Unlike typical sex surveys that tell us what people said they did, but not necessarily what they did in practice, we know “what actually happened” over the past 35 years. Three key results from this natural experiment are now evident:
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