In a piece wherein Concerned Women declare the cause of HIV and AIDS.  Betcha can't guess what it is!  Or, maybe you can.  But that's not the meat of this post.

The District [of Columbia] has the worst AIDS rate of any city in America –– twice the rate of New York and four times the rate of Detroit. Previous data indicates that one in 20 D.C. residents is thought to have HIV and one in 50, AIDS.

Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, Director and Senior Fellow of the Beverly LaHaye Institute (the think tank for Concerned Women for America), said, “The information in the report is being presented as evidence that everyone can get HIV/AIDS, yet evidence is overwhelming that homosexual sex and IV drug use are sources of the virus. Obviously, after 25 years promiscuous individuals are bringing the virus to the heterosexual community, but it is a disservice to the public to use such scare tactics.”

Crouse added, “We owe it to the public to stress that promiscuity is the basic problem. We must teach our children that the healthy way of life is abstinence prior to marriage and fidelity within marriage. We must create a new cultural environment where adults are encouraged to treat sex with the respect that it deserves; sleeping around is not just foolish, it is also dangerous.”

First of all, the very reason why her assertion is wrong.  The New York Times article (likely their original source) Specifically that 37% of new cases were from heterosexual contact versus 25% coming from men having unprotected sex with men. 

The report said that from 2001 to 2006, 56 children, ages 13 or younger, were found to have either H.I.V. or AIDS, and almost all of them were infected at birth.

These cases, which account for 6 percent of all mother-to-child H.I.V. infections in the nation in the last five years, were especially alarming, city officials said, because they could have been avoided with routine H.I.V. testing during pregnancy, quick-results oral swabs during labor and “fast tracking” of the anti-retroviral drugs that can prevent transmission during delivery.

Although black residents account for 57 percent of the city’s population of 500,000 or so, they account for 81 percent of new reports of H.I.V. cases and about 86 percent of people with AIDS.

The report also found that the disease spread through heterosexual contact in more than 37 percent of the cases detected from 2001 to last year, in contrast with the 25 percent of cases attributable to men having sex with men. Starting in 2004, the number of new H.I.V. cases among men and women ages 40 to 49 outpaced every other age group in the city.

The 'meat' after the fold.

What's worse is the flippant attitude that the "pro-family" crowd has taken lately to rub-in, like salt on an open wound, the fact that we can't get married and some of the great benefits we are denied because of that.  Of course to be fair she's not specifically talking about the 1,138 quantitative legal rights that come with marriage, but instead a more emotional, psycological, and profound benefit.

No one is denying that gay men tend to wind up in less than monogomous relationships.  With that said there are many many monogomous relationships that are healthy and happy.  Take our very own Terrance (Republic of T) for example (assumption).

My example will be the psychological effect of marriage.  (Disclosure: I'm no psycologist, nor have I studied psychology).  In my experience and observations of both straight and gay men is that a man is less likely to cheat or sleep with multiple partners if he puts on a ring and signs a legally binding contract with the state.

In retrospect that's probably one of the many reasons that some men (straight or gay) try to avoid marriage.  To them it means a lifetime commitment to one person.  But most of the time after a good amount of courtship and realising that that person is who they want to spend the rest of his life with he will take the initiative to commit to that person.

There are so many men and women out there that are and have been for a long long time ready to make that commitment to their partners. The religious right would then say "So have a commitment ceremony!"  And a lot of people do, but that's still just more of a verbal and maybe financial commitment.  And even in the minds of those that have these ceremonies the thought of commitment is just as nebulous as the space between George W. Bush's ears.  It simply does not carry the same weight as an actual marriage.

So while Janice preaches abstinence before, fidelity within, and the importance of treating sex with the respect it deserves, her position to deny others of the very basic rite of marriage based on her biblically myopic view points encourage and foster the opposite.  And yet, she has the audacity to rub it in.