Rapid City homosexual activist Thomas Allen Heald has a story featured in the Rapid City Weekly News entitled "A year after South Dakota man’s HIV+ diagnosis, life goes on."
The closest we get to candor in this article is the following quote from the man with AIDS:
“No, I’m not hiding it from them out of fear of disapproval — far from it. They would only love me all the more, but I don’t want to hurt them like this. It’s not an instant death sentence, but due to my own folly and stupidity, I’ve made my life and the lives of those who know and love me very, very complicated. I apologize to everyone for that. In the meantime, please don’t anyone out there make the same mistake I did — having unprotected sex. I took my chances …”
The rest of the article attempts to paint this man as an unwitting victim of something that just struck him out of the blue, kind of like walking along and getting hit in the head by a meteor; nothing he did contributed to his circumstances:
“I remember hearing about it before I entered my teens, when it was thought to be a ‘gay-only’ disease.
As if it we now realize can strike a person without doing anything whatsoever to increase ones chances of getting it.
While there are many who have AIDS and aren't homosexual, according to the New York Times, 71% of AIDS sufferers there are said to be homosexual and bisexual men. Except for those who innocently get it through a blood transfusion, or a married person who gets it because their spouse was unfaithful and got it from someone else, everyone else who contracted AIDS engaged in immoral and unhealthy behavior to get it.
Can anyone tell me how two faithful married people can contract AIDS without getting it through a blood transfusion?
A member of my family died of AIDS some years ago, so I have a little knowledge of the subject--as if one needed close experience to understand how AIDS is contracted.
I'm sorry for the suffering the man in this story is going through. But it's wrong and it's dangerous to portray him as an unwitting victim of this disease, someone designed to illicit sympathy. If he (and this so-called story) were out there to encourage people to not only have safe sex (and the only true safe sex is between a man and woman in marriage), or better yet, to stop engaging in homosexual sex, I could applaud the story. But it's a misplaced sympathy piece.
And misplaced sympathy often gets people hurt or killed.
