In a movie that’s now 40 years old, one of Woody Allen’s first efforts, called “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” Gene Wilder plays a man in love with a sheep. In one scene he is lying in bed with the sheep smoking the obligatory sexual after glow cigarette. At that time, it was believed that syphilis the disease came from shepherds having sex with sheep. It’s possible that the story that AIDS came from human sex with monkeys was merely a conflation with the sheep story.
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| Hot Monkey Love wouldn't be like this. |
The sheep story may have a glint of truth in real life. On the other hand, monkeys are not as passive as sheep. Monkeys, chimps, siminians are known to be pretty aggressively vicious, so the story about sex with them is a very difficult one to comprehend. And since it wasn’t all the monkeys that had been infected with SIV (their version of HIV), only a small number, if indeed there was human-monkey sex, it makes the odds extremely high that the monkey the person happened to pick was infected with it.
The way some of my Christian evangelist friends often explain the homosexual marriage issue to me is through the slippery slope of how it will lead to bestiality: and of course, there’s God’s message that the “punishment” for homosexuality is the curse of a deadly disease.
Then we have what Rick Santorum said in 2003, equating homosexuality with “man on dog” acts rising to the level of sodomy, and so offending some of those in the gay community that now you can’t google Santorum without an embarrassing search result.
This recent PolitiFact Tennessee ruling on Tennessee Republican Stacey Campfield reflects the conservative evangelical view of God’s punishment of bestiality and its relationship to homosexuals in its finding of Pants on Fire for his statement that “AIDS was transmitted to humans because ‘one guy’ had sex with ‘a monkey’ and then started ‘having sex with men.’”
My conservative counterpart has a number of problems with this ruling in his Grading PolitiFact piece, mainly “ because journalists often display a difficulty in reporting science and because of a widespread journalistic sympathy toward social liberalism.” That social liberalism being tolerance of gays and the efforts to make gay marriage legal, or as Bryan came right out and said with an implicit homophobic feel: “the harm of homosexual practices…the spread of AIDS.”
According to him, “Campfield was not attempting to make any point associated with his proposed legislation…” But the interview in which he made the statement was about a “Don’t Say Gay” bill he was sponsoring which critics claimed “could open the door to anti-gay bullying.” As part of his agenda in promoting this legislation, there could only be one reason Campfield was making these claims: to further spread fears about the “harms of homosexual practices.”
Then Campfield back-pedaled in his blog, saying this theory had not been neither proven or disproven. The problem with this is that no one—at least no reputable source, that I can find-- presents this as a theory of the origin of AIDS, for example, the CDC, or Wikipedia, or even Conservapedia (which, like Bryan, seems to be more concerned with it being spread by homosexuals). Wiki-Answers claims it is an urban myth. Snopes refutes an entirely different myth about the origins of AIDS: that it was started by the CIA. So if it was a theory, it is no longer used. Of course, Bryan White conveniently never looks into or just ignores this detail.
In his typical manner, Bryan twists the ruling to fit his own biases. By Bryan this wasn’t about how AIDS originated, it’s how AIDS is spread by homosexuals. But if the story about man on monkey sex is not true, it would not follow that “that man” started having sex with other men to spread it. It was much more complicated, and involved heterosexual sex as well. And an “assertion” (the definition of which Bryan uses to criticize Campfield’s gay-defending counterpart) that if people would only engage in “traditional” heterosexual, vaginal sex the world might be without this “scourge”, made this a plausible-sounding falsehood to push anti-gay legislation.
The rest of Bryan White’s argument is incredibly weak. When an expert PolitiFact interviews named Beatrice Hahn says "It surely wasn't transmitted through sexual activity (with simians)" Bryan claims “she is not relating a scientific finding. She is offering an opinion with some scientific evidence behind it. On the other hand, Campfield gets a hugely equivocating, sublimely bloviating chunk of “charitable interpretation” from Bryan —“ Campfield's explanation of the origin of AIDS was not ridiculous. Nor was it necessarily false. Unlikely? Yes--but perhaps no less likely than the possibility of a good excuse for the shoddy reporting in this effort from PolitiFact Tennessee.”
Got to get that dig in, come hell or high water. Shoddy reporting? PolitiFact Tennessee has just started up this year, and writer/researcher Zack McMillin had 15 sources along with an edit from both Bill Adair and Tom Chester. I’d say it was no more likely than the possibility of an abysmally bad review from Bryan White….which this certainly is.
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