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Don’t say gays cause aids

State Senator Stacey Campfield said some uninformed things about AIDS recently, namely that it started from someone having sex with monkey in Africa. A local restaurant refused him service over his comments. And a lot of local folks rejoice and some folks cried discrimination against Campfield. If someone doesn’t like or has issue with an individual, that is not indicative of broad discrimination.

I tend to share Les’ sentiment:

Discriminating is not the nuclear bomb dirty word Rich and Linoge make it out to be.

20 Responses to “Don’t say gays cause aids”

  1. Nomen Nescio Says:

    for the record: http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2012/01/tennessee_senator_not_concerne.php

  2. Bubblehead Les Says:

    So If I like 9mm, does that mean I’m discriminating against the .45ACP?

  3. mikee Says:

    I’d just put whipped cream and chocolate sauce on his tuna salad sandwich instead of mayo, and let him figure out what it meant without saying anything to him.

  4. Rich Hailey Says:

    Group A and B are granted equal protections under the Constitution. Group A is granted additional protection based on sympathy, guilt, whatever. By definition, Group A has more rights than Groups B, and equal protection is gone.

    That’s my argument with Les and the rest, not whether or not Campfield is an idiot.

    Boggs is trying to have it both ways.
    “We don’t serve f*&*ing homophobes,” is discrimination. “I don’t like Campfield.” is not, unless her dislike is based on his religious beliefs.

    All I want is a little consistency. Either we believe that all people deserve equal protections under the law or we don’t.

  5. StanInTexas Says:

    Rich, all animals are equal…

    But some are MORE equal than others.

  6. Les Jones Says:

    Rich, no one’s going to get protection against discrimination for political beliefs or political statements. Ain’t gonna happen.

    Do you think a Jewish deli should be forced to serve swastika-tattooed neo-Nazis who are shouting anti-Jewish slogans?

    Do you think a soul food restaurant should be forced to serve a bunch of hood-wearing Klansmen who call their waiter a n*****?

    What you seem to want is for someone like Campfield to be able to walk into Boggs’ restaurant, shout something offensive about “fags have AIDS from monkey sex” and then demand “bitch, get me mah pie” preferably in an Eric Cartman voice.

    It ain’t gonna happen. Dream on.

  7. SayUncle Says:

    Do you think a soul food restaurant should be forced to serve a bunch of hood-wearing Klansmen who call their waiter a n*****?

    Do you think a hood-wearing Klansmen should be forced to serve black people? Because that’s actually a law.

  8. Les Jones Says:

    Unc, in my example the Klansmen weren’t being thrown out because of their race. They were thrown out because of their behavior.

    “Do you think a hood-wearing Klansmen should be forced to serve black people?”

    He can’t deny them service for being black. If they’re screaming at him and calling him a fag he’s free to deny them service for being homophobic assholes.

    (What, you don’t think there are gay Klansmen or homophobic black people?)

  9. Rivrdog Says:

    Les, you’ve hit the nut of the matter: the behavior. When Law attempts to enforce the ideal of a polite society, it invariably fails at that. This is one of the the main reasons you salute the Stars and Stripes instead of the Union Jack – we have the right to be impolite, and yes, even offend (verbally) in this nation, and we insisted on that when we broke away from the English Crown.

    When we let our lawmakers pass the so-called “hate speech” laws, we gave away a good chunk of our freedom. Rather, others gave it away. I follow Justice Learned Hand’s dicta which said that short of crying “fire” in a crowded theater, any speech was permissible under our Constitution.

    You don’t have a right not to be offended. There is a criminal defense doctrine called “the fighting words test” which says that if the offensive words are bad enough, and ordinary fisticuffs ensue, the fighter who uttered the “fighting words” cannot claim to have been defending him/her self and thereby avoid a charge of simple assault. That test is where the matter should have ended, law-wise. The imposition of forced polity via the “hate speech” laws violates the very idea that this is supposed to be a society based on freedoms.

    I consider such law to be unconstitutional, and I refuse to follow it. I’ll say what I am going to say, how I want to say it, and I’m prepared to defend myself both physically AND legally when I do so.

  10. Nomen Nescio Says:

    there are lines of work where you’re actually required to provide services to people in spite of, and regardless of, whatever prejudices you may have against the social group(s) those people belong to. if this doesn’t agree with you, you’re free to find another line of work, perhaps something not in a service industry.

    klansmen waiters have to serve black folks. catholic pharmacists have to dispense birth control. muslim cab drivers don’t get to refuse to drive hog farmers. if your prejudices, biases, or religious notions don’t allow you to serve all people equally, don’t pursue a career where you’ll be expected to do just that.

    (TL;DR: what Les said.)

  11. Steve in TN Says:

    There are homophobes, there are heterophobes, and then there’s the rest of us just trying to live peacefully.

  12. HL Says:

    Its funny klansmen came up in this discussion. The restaurant that asked Campfield to leave served Klansman after a protest right out front of her joint. It was the owner who said that on the radio this week.

    Not to get into whether the bill is homophohic or not, because it doesn’t really matter either way…but do we need to do sex education in middle and elementary school instead of Math, Literature and Economics? I think that is what the bill is really asking.

    I have no kids, so I don’t really care…but my wife is a 1st grade teacher, and I don’t think she really wants to talk about “goobers” and “boobies” in class all that much.

  13. Nomen Nescio Says:

    sex ed needs to start before the kids start having sex. i’ve really no idea when that is these days, but for some at least, middle school might be just in time.

  14. HL Says:

    sex ed needs to start before the kids start having sex. i’ve really no idea when that is these days, but for some at least, middle school might be just in time.

    I agree with the timing, but let their parents teach them. Little Johnnie’s dad may not be able to do long division, but he probably knows where Johnnie came from.

  15. Linoge Says:

    Y’know, aside from that sentiment making absolutely no sense in light of a post wherein I clearly wrote:

    Second, I believe that corporations / companies / businesses / etc. should be able to do, and not do, business with whomever and whatever they so choose. Yes, that means I would be comfortable with businesses discriminating against blacks, homosexuals, Irish, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, open carriers, etc. etc. etc. And? We, as individual people, discriminate for or against other people all the time, and not only would it be unconstitutional for someone to force us to do otherwise (can anyone say “freedom of association”?), but it would simply be wrong. As such, there is simply no reason why an owner of a business should be forced to associate with, or not associate with, people against his will by way of his business.

    But, hey, who cares about what someone actually said, huh?

  16. Paul Rain Says:

    Ah… lovely. Does this mean Lester Maddox could have kept his restaurant open if he’d simply had a policy of only serving people who believed whites were superior to blacks? All government restrictions on how a man chooses to run his business, where that business is not uniquely privileged by government in some manner, are bunk. Anyone who takes pleasure in this while endorsing restrictions on other people’s rights to operate as they please is no kind of free citizen.

    As far as Cumpfield’s comments go, there is absolutely no way to tell the circumstances in which the various HIV cases came over from primates. It’s far from impossible sex was involved. While an adult human male having regular old non-forceful vaginal sex with a adult human female has a very small chance of catching the AIDS, one would imagine that engaging in sexual activities with a smaller animal would be pretty messy in terms of potentially infectious fluids, so the chances might not be all that small. The Kinsey study (from a population of generally urban and fairly disturbed or criminal individuals) found 8% of males had engaged in at least one act of bestiality. I doubt that 20th century Africans were all so uniquely well adjusted that none of them ever tried it on with a monkey.

    As for the ‘airline pilot’ comments- it’s true we now know that there were HIV infections in the United States before Gaëtan Dugas, who was a flight attendant not an airline pilot. However, the large number of men who had tens (or hundreds in Dugas’s case) of inherently high-risk sexual encounters with anonymous males every year played a big role in the spread of HIV. It’s true that a couple of the other prongs of 4H (Haitians, haemophiliacs, and heroin addicts) played a part, but there’s only so much blood a HIV positive junkie can donate.

    Campfield certainly should have expected this reaction. Noted playwright Larry Kramer wrote a book back in the late 70’s that was taken as being critical of the gay lifestyle and faced a typically level-headed response from (his) homosexual community- his book was taken off the shelves of the only gay bookstore in his home town, and he was banned from his local grocery store. How likely is it that someone who doesn’t even practice what they preach against is going to get a better reaction?

  17. Nomen Nescio Says:

    Paul at #16 didn’t read my reference in #1. short version: HIV-1 is derived from chimpanzees, and while some people do eat chimp meat, you’d have to be near-suicidal to try and have sex with one. they’re strong enough to tear an adult human limb from limb.

    yes, it’s possible HIV-1 crossed over the species barrier that way, but it’s also possible i’ll be struck by lightning today. i suspect me getting struck by lightning is the more likely scenario. bush meat, however, is an everyday thing in many parts of the world.

  18. Paul Rain Says:

    Yes, I know people say that chimpanzees are stronger than humans yaddayadda yadda. But I don’t see Abbie Smith fighting chimpanzees real often. I reckon I could take one.

  19. Paul Rain Says:

    But then, I’m just basing that on the fact that while chimpanzees may have been scientifically proven to be able to dead-lift more weight per pound of body weight, that’s only relevant if you’re similarly built to a chimp. I’d love to see an actual example of an human male ‘[torn] limb from limb’.

  20. Nomen Nescio Says:

    why even bother with the weirdly titillating sex-with-monkeys angle, though? we know african hunters kill chimps for food, and we know prostitution (the plain old hetero kind) is rampant in that part of the world, too; simple, credible, likely and commonplace explanation right there. why not just use the probable one instead of going looking for a less probable one that you can fap to?

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