-Caveat Lector-
from:
http://www.webpan.com/dsinclair/myths.html
-----
The Liberal Media and other right-wing myths � Christian Historical
Revisionism � Dr. Laura � Christian Coalition � Religious Freedom Amendment �
"Judicial Activism" � Promise Keepers � Southern Baptist Convention � Family
Research Council � American Family Association � Concerned Women for America �
Eagle Forum � Operation Rescue � Christian Action Network � American Center
for Law and Justice � Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights �
Citizens for Excellence in Education � Education � The Marriage Law Project �
Ex-gay ministries � Jerry Falwell � Gary Bauer � Pat Robertson � Bob Barr �
Tom Delay
Right-Wing Myths Exposed (a work in progress)
The Myth of The Liberal Media
"Beyond the 2000 Election, this conservative media tilt has become a dominant
reality in modern U.S. politics.
The imbalance also was not an accident. It resulted from a conscious,
expensive and well-conceived plan by conservatives to build what amounts to a
rapid-response media machine. This machine closely coordinates with
Republican leaders and can strongly influence - if not dictate - what is
considered news."
The Media Is the Mess (July 17, 2001 article)
"I admit it -- the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole
thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."
William Kristol, as reported by the New Yorker, 5/22/95
"In the west, 10 or 20 years, there has been massive research documenting the
fact that the media are extraordinarily subordinated to external power. Now,
when you have that power, the best technique is to ignore all of that
discussion, ignore it totally, and to eliminate it, by the simple device of
asserting the opposite. If you assert the opposite, that eliminates mountains
of evidence demonstrating that what you are saying is false. That's what
power means. And the way we assert the opposite is by just saying that the
media are liberal."
Noan Chomsky, in FSTV's documentation The Myth Of The Liberal Media
Based on its recent direct-mail campaign, one of the [Leadership Institute's]
primary fund- raising strategies is to convince conservative donors that its
graduates can neutralize what it regards as left-leaning news media.
"Liberal media bias is out of control," said the letter, which was mailed
over [Rep. J.C.] Watts's signature, but which [the institute's founder and
president] Mr. Blackwell said was written at the institute. "It's indecent.
It's time you and I did something about it."
When asked for examples of how bias by news organizations was undermining the
presidency of George W. Bush, Mr. Blackwell complained about what he
described as excessive press attention paid to Mr. Bush's critics, like
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.
An alumna of the institute, who was recommended by Mr. Blackwell, found it
difficult to cite cases of "out of control" liberal bias in recent news
coverage.
"I have been in local TV newsrooms in Phoenix, Seattle and Pittsburgh, and I
don't think there is bias, either liberal or conservative," said the alumna,
Tallee Whitehorn, 27, an assistant news director at WTAE- TV, an ABC
affiliate in Pittsburgh. "This is not really a place for it, unless I wanted
to get a lot of hate mail, which I don't."
The young people in Mr. Montini's class were also hard-pressed to come up
with examples of the news- media bias mentioned in Mr. Watts's fund-raising
letter.
Mr. Tietz said he had been sensitized to such matters in recent months by
reading conservative books, including Whitaker Chambers's "Witness." That
book, Mr. Tietz said, "explains the deep-down meanness of the left."
But as for seeing that meanness in coverage of President Bush, Mr. Tietz
said, "Honestly, I haven't noticed it one way or another."
from a June 11, 2001 New York Times article on the Leadership Institute (a
training camp for conservative journalists) titled "In Virginia, Young
Conservatives Learn How to Develop and Use Their Political Voices"
For conservatives of every persuasion, it is a self-evident truth that the
mass media are liberally biased. As a proud liberal myself, I wish it was
true: where are those liberal TV channels? Could I please sign up for them?
All I get on my satelite system are center-right channels such as CNN, CNBC,
MSNBC, and far-right channels such as the "we distort, you deride", Fox News,
owned by equally far-right media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, and assorted
christian nutball channels such as the Trinity Broadcasting Network or Pat
Robertson's The 700 Club, carried by Fox Family.
Believing in freedom of speech, I do not mind that far-right viewpoints are
presented on TV on a daily basis. What I strongly object to is that these
viewpoints are not balanced by equally far-left viewpoints. Most pundits who
are nominally liberal are in fact centrists. Fox News' Hannity & Colmes is a
good case in point: Sean Hannity is tagged as the conservative on the show,
while Alan Colmes is supposedly his liberal counterpart. Not bad as a first
approximation, but not the whole story either. While Colmes is an educated,
mainstream liberal who is commited to journalistic ethics such as basic
fairness, college dropout Hannity is a far-right firebrand who introduces
guests from the "Family Research" Council as "our good friend from the FRC",
who habitually refers to his own views and those of regular guest Jerry
Falwell as "christian" without any qualifier (ignoring the fact that
religious right views are not representative of mainstream christianity), and
who treats liberal guests as mere props to get his own point of view across,
which usually involves interrupting and screaming. Colmes, on the other hand,
is so tame that one wonders whether Foxnews really pays him to be a
scarecrow. Fair and Balanced?
Hardly. But by Fox standards, Hannity & Colmes is about as fair and unbiased
as it gets. Usually, Fox News' idea of fairness and balance involves having a
center-right conservative disagree with a far-right conservative, and calling
that travesty a debate, or letting a conservative (but never a liberal) have
his own show altogether. How come that everytime Bill O'Reilly takes a break
from The O'Reilly Factor, his substitute is someone from the far right of the
political spectrum, such as former congressman and now syndicated radio host
Bob Dornan or hard-right nitwit Michael Reagan (who left the GOP because it
was not radical enough)? And why is it that 8 years of unrelenting, non-stop
demonization of Clinton and his wife by these people is okay, but suggesting
that Bush is illegitimate is "partisan rancor"? The answer is of course that
Foxnews is a conservative news outlet, even though its on-air personel
asserts the contrary ("fair and balanced") like a mantra.
But the situation is hardly any better on the other (supposedly liberal)
cable news channels. Liberals or centrists may not be on unless their
viewpoints are 'balanced' by conservative viewpoints (as in CNN's Capital Gang
or Crossfire), while hard-right pundits such as Christ Matthews get their
own shows. ABC's 20/20 regularly features the views of pro-corporate
extremist John Stossel, but does not bother to balance those views by a
progressive perspective. Commenting on a 1998 Stossel piece which made the
case that greed is good, FAIR demanded "to see an equally outspoken
progressive journalist given an hour to explain why greed is a serious
problem in American society". Needless to say that that demand went
unanswered. Stossel, despite a documented history of using deceptive
statistics, one-sided witness testimony, distortions and outright lies to
promote an extremist agenda is still on the job at ABC.
To make matters worse, it is not just the conservative punditocracy which is
less than fair and impartial. The mass media as a whole are seriously biased
- the conservative way. It was the mass media that have co-opted and thus
legitimized the Republican code phrase "marriage penalty". There is no tax in
the tax code that is called "The Marriage Penalty Tax", yet the media have
been using this propagandistic phrase without any qualifiers, making "the
marriage penality (tax)" an objective fact of life, just as they routinely
report on "partial birth" (instead of "late term") abortion. Similarly, they
have been using the right-wing codephrase "death tax" to con a significant
fraction of the population into thinking that the inheritance tax concerns
ordinary people (as opposed to the super-rich).
The mass media's coverage of the presidential race 2000 was slanted in favor
of Bush from day one. As early as 1999, the media had picked their winner,
George W. Bush, and started to tell the public that W's victory was a
foregone conclusion. Throughout the campaign and the Florida aftermath, they
stayed "on message": that Gore was a lier and exaggerator, while Bush was a
"different kind of Republican", a likeable guy, and a real pal. They put
every real or alleged inappropriate behavior, inaccuracy or exaggeration from
Gore under the magnifying glass, and simultaneously ignored W's big lies and
blunders: that he weaseled himself out of jury duty to cover up a DUI arrest,
that he refused to admit to being a recreational drug user and that he went
AWOL while in the national guard. All of it with impunity of course, thanks
to Daddy's connections.
The mass media never found it worth mentioning that this man who in the
debates prided himself on being a succesful businessman and Washington
outsider had in fact driven several oil companies into bankruptcy, one after
an other, and was bailed out every single time thanks to his family
connections. As a son of wealth and privilege, Bush had never had to work for
anything, and got away with acts that would have gotten anyone else into
jail. Bush's dirty tricks, both against McCain and against Gore, were
revolting even by Republican campaign standards, but the media never
challenged Bush to explain himself. Only when Gore pointed these out, they
blasted him for "negative campaigning".
As the campaign drew to a close, it became even more apparent that the mass
media would go to any lengths to discredit Gore while giving Bush a free
ride. In the presidential debate in Boston, on October 3, 2000, Bush had the
audacity to claim that
"[Gore] has outspent me, the special interests are outspending me (..)"
while the truth is that Bush broke all spending records in US history and
outspent everyone, including the Republicans who ran before him by a wide
margin! It was a flat-out lie, but the "liberal" mass media let him get away
with it. This hypocrisy of the mass media has been well documented by a FAIR
article titled Serial Exaggerators: Media's double standard on political lying
.
Then, on election night, Fox News dropped all pretense of being unbiased and
let Bush's cousin John Ellis call Florida for Bush at 2:16 am, prompting the
other four networks to do the same within minutes. From that point onward,
Gore had to fight an uphill battle against the perception that Bush had won
Florida, which we know today he has not.
After election day, the pro-Bush campaign of the media only intensified.
Chris Matthews, who only days before the election had found the idea of Gore
losing the popular vote but winning the electoral one wholly unpalatable,
developed selective amnesia and was now arguing for Gore, the winner of the
popular vote, to concede! The rest of the punditry joined into this rousing
chorus of "concede, concede", ominously warning that simply counting the
votes in Florida would create a constitutional crisis. They even rewrote
history in the process, popularizing the myth that Nixon conceded gracefully
in 1960 without putting up a legal fight (the opposite is true).
Naturally, the transparent hypocrisy of the GOP's position went unnoticed or
was downplayed. Hand-counting, which is universally accepted as more accurate
than machine-counting (even by Bush himself, and by his lawyers in New
Mexico, who demanded a hand-recount at the same time that Baker was
succesfully discrediting the method in Florida) now became unreliable. That
House Majority Whip Tom DeLay was behind the GOP mob that shut down the
Miami-Dade recount: hardly worth reporting. The paid republican rioters with
their professionally made "Sore Loserman" signs and t-shirts: reported as
grassroots protestors. That minority voters had been intimidated from voting
by GOP operatives: not worth any headlines. That Katherine Harris had 12,000
predominantly black voters falsely removed from voter rolls as convicted
fellons: reported in the British Newspaper Observer, but ignored by the US
media.
The day after the GOP majority on the Supreme Court had installed Emperor
Bush on the throne, the mass media started to echo conservative calls for
"unity" and "healing". The good of the nation, we were told by the corporate
media outlets, required us to support President "elect" Bush. How that
healing is supposed to take place when the dagger is still firmly lodged in
the wound, they did not say. John Gibson, guest-hosting the O'Reilly Factor
on Fox News on 12/15/00, even suggested that the Florida ballots should be
locked away for eight years or burned, because the legitimacy of George W.
Bush's presidency is a higher good than the truth. Is it even conceivable
that a Fox pundit would suggest that Clinton should not have been
investigated, to preserve the public's respect for the office of president?
The sad and morally repugnant story of coup d'etat 2000 continues to this
day. The truth - that Bush lost the election and has not one iota of
legitimacy to push his far-right agenda - has become a non-fact for the mass
media. That Bush jettisoned all pretense of being a "different kind of
Republican" with his hard-right cabinet appointments was dismissed as slander
from the usual liberal special interest groups and never examined in detail.
Ashcroft and Norton got a free pass. They were dutifully referred to as
"controversial", but the mass media were silent on exactly how and why these
people are controversial. The protests against His Fraudulency's inauguration
were downplayed and protestors marginalized as "fringe groups", while
commentators were drooling over inauguration trivia.
As President Bush is preparing to ram his tax cut for the wealthy through
congress, the mass media are silent on the fact that Governor Bush's tax cuts
in Texas have left the state unable to pay its bills, leaving the republican
state legislature and governor no choice but to raise taxes again. But try to
call in on some of the political shows on the cable news channels and mention
the inconvenient fact that the American people elected Al Gore to be their
president, and you will be chided by the pundits for being a complete moron -
get over it, will you?
But enough anecdotal evidence. Maybe I'm just suffering from selective
perception of reality, seing what I expect to see? Objective data is required
to substantiate the claim that the bias of the media is in fact a
conservative one, and FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) has been
compiling just that kind of data for 15 years now. FAIR has documented that
conservative or right-leaning "think" tanks (like Heritage, Cato, RAND or our
favourite, the "Family Research" council) received more than 50% of media
citations in 1998 and 1999, while left-wing and progressive think tanks
overally received less than 13%. FAIR's issue collection reveals, among other
things, how the mass media
* have helped create the myth that social security is failing, paving the
way for the realization of one of the right's political wet dreams:
privatization of social security
* perpetuate conservative myths about wellfare and simultanously turn a
blind eye to corporate wellfare
* sensationalize street crime and ignore corporate crime
* treat religious right groups such as the Promise Keepers with kid's
gloves and thus help legitimize them in the public perception
* generally avoid reporting on the lunatic fringe of the right, such as
militias, neo-Nazis and anti-abortion terrorists, and in particular, avoid
examining the personal and ideological connections these groups have to the
Republican party
* created the perception that there is widespread popular opposition to
affirmative action when in fact most people support it
* all but ignore waste, mismanagment and corruption in the
military-industrial complex, especially as it relates to the planned missile
defense system
* downplayed protests against the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO by
portraying protestors as leftist fringe groups, communists and anarchists
* report corporate PR as legitimate scientific research.
Given these facts, the claim of the liberal media bias is shaky enough as it
relates to major newspapers and television networks. But when one admits
radio stations into the picture, the claim becomes wholly preposterous.
Conservative hate radio has been carpet bombing the nation with hard-right
ideology, unbridled hatred towards liberals and Clinton, distortions, lies
and bogus science for years. Hate radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Gordon
Liddy, Michael Reagan and Oliver North are heard by millions of people every
day, and they have no progressive counterparts of any significance. Not
exactly surprising, considering that corporate sponsors have a vested
interest in supporting pro-business voices, and suppressing progressive ones.
And yet, the conservative agenda is and remains singularly unpopular with the
population at large, as evidenced by the fact that the GOP can only win
elections by hiding its true objectives and playing moderate, running
scorched-earth campaigns of personal destruction, smear and slander,
intimidation of minority voters and other means of depressing voter turnout -
and even then only barely. As Rush Limbaugh gets never tired of telling his
white, male and angry audience - it must be someone else's fault. Unable to
face the fact that a majority of the population simply does not want
theocracy, social darwinism and corporate supremacy, they had to find a
scapegoat - or invent one if needed. Thus The Liberal Media myth was born.
The Liberal Media myth is a propaganda tool employed by conservative radio
hosts, columnists and pundits as a convenient excuse why after 20 years their
ideology has failed to convince the public at large, and as an intellectual
inocculation of the public against the evidence that the media bias is in
fact a conservative one.
Not only does the liberal media claim have no basis in fact, it also does not
make sense considering the issues of media ownership and influence of
advertisers. Most media outlets are owned by a handful of conservative
corporations and individuals, and funded by usually economically conservative
advertisers who have no need for an educated, alert, independent and critical
citizenry. What they need is a dumb, bored, cynical and apathetic public that
has abandoned all critical faculties and is easily distracted by celebrity
gossip and mindless sports games. A public that will believe anything it is
told, or nothing at all, which amounts to the same end result. This
pro-corporate conservative bias of the media is well-documented and shows
itself in consistent under-reporting or ignoring of any information that
would lead people to question the fundamental status quo.
Further Reading:
* The Myth of the Liberal Media
* Media and protests�Part Three: Who are the fringe people?
* News media and protests�Part Two
* The News media and political protests
* Debate or CIA propaganda?
* Democracy, the election, and the news media
* Lies, Conservatives and Statistics
* Media in the 'Crossfire'
* Examining the "Liberal Media" Claim - Journalists' Views on Politics,
Economic Policy and Media Coverage
* Meet the Myth-Makers: Right-Wing Media Groups Provide Ammo for "Liberal
Media" Claims
* Rush Limbaugh, Talk Radio and The Corporate Bias Media
* Media Whores Online
* FAIR's Rush Limbaugh Resources
* The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh Debates Reality
* The Way Things Really Are: Debunking Rush Limbaugh On The Environment
* Maybe The Public -- Not The Press -- Has A Leftist Bias
* Lessons of Right-Wing Philanthropy
* Conservative Foundations Lavishly Subsidize Authors While The Left Loses
Out: The 'Right' Books and Big Ideas
* Think Tanks and Research Insititutes
* Book Excerpt: Black Holes of Power
The Myth Of The Homosexual Lifestyle
"The homosexual lifestyle is inconsistent with the proper raising of
children. Because homosexual relationships are characteristically unstable,
they are less likely to provide children the security they need. " source
Listen to an activist of the far right rant against gays and lesbians for a
few minutes, and you will hear the expression "the homosexual lifestyle" at
least once. It is one of the standing phrases of the Religious Right, and
they use it ad nauseam and beyond. However, they rarely explain what it is
supposed to mean. It is the purpose of this little essay to shed some light
on the definiton and proper usage of the word lifestyle, and to show that the
Religious Right usage of the word in conjunction with homosexual is
propagandistic and misleading.
Let us first notice that there is an inherent ambiguity in the phrase the
homosexual lifestyle. It is supposed to mean the lifestyle that homosexuals
have, or the lifestyle that homosexuality is?
I will come back to that question after I have explored the meaning of the
word lifestyle.
Webster's dictionary defines lifestyle as
"the way in which an individual lives, e.g. as to dress, habits, friendships,
values."
The Cambridge International Dictionary of English gives the following
definition:
"someone's way of living; the things that a person or particular group of
people usually do
He doesn't have a very healthy lifestyle - a lot of stress, a lot of food and
no exercise.
It's a TV show that looks at the lifestyles of movie stars.
The group of women had pursued an alternative lifestyle, bringing up their
children communally and sharing their resources. "
Dictionary.com gives the following usage note:
"When lifestyle began to gain wide currency a generation ago, a number of
critics objected to it as voguish and superficial, perhaps because it
appeared to elevate habits of consumption, dress, and recreation to a primary
basis of social classification. Nonetheless, the word has proved durable and
useful, if only because such categories do in fact figure importantly in the
schemes that Americans commonly invoke in explaining social values and social
behavior, whether appropriately or not, as in Rachel Brownstein's remark that
an anticonventional lifestyle is no sure sign of feminist politics, or
indeed, of any politics at all. As such, the word has won the occasionally
grudging acceptance of the Usage Panel. Fifty-three percent of the Panelists
accepts the word in the sentence Bohemian attitudes toward conventional
society have been outstripped and outdated by the lifestyles of millions of
young people, and fully 70 percent accepts the word in the sentence Salaries
in the Bay Area may be higher, but it may cost employees as much as 30
percent more to maintain their lifestyles, where the economic context makes
more apparent the need for a word that denotes categories based on
consumption practices."
In summary, lifestyle is generally understood to refer to habits of
consumption, dress and recreation, such as favourite foods and drinks, where
they are eaten (at home/restaurants/parties), and with whom
(alone/family/friends), what products one uses for body hygiene, what clothes
one wears, what shows one watches on television, what movies ones sees, and
so on.
It should be clear even to someone who has never consciously met a gay man or
a lesbian woman that there is no uniformity of consumption habits, or dress,
or hobbies among the group of people with a homosexual orientation. And why
should there be? There is no connection whatsoever between who we love and
what we like for breakfast.
Now that we have disposed of the idea of a uniform lifestyle among homosexuals
, we can address the second idea: that homosexuality itself is a lifestyle.
>From the examples, it is apparent that a lifestyle has two distinguishing
qualities. It is
a. superficial
b. freely chosen.
Religious faith does not belong to the category of lifestyle, because it
permeates the very essence of one's personality. It may be freely chosen, but
it is not superficial.
Race, nationality, gender and the color of your eyes are not lifestyles,
because they are inborn traits. They may be superficial, but they are not
freely chosen.
As we see, a certain trait can fail to be a lifestyle on just one of the two
accounts. Love towards and sexual attraction to members of the same sex fails
to be a lifestyle on both accounts. It is neither superficial, nor freely
chosen. Throughout history, gay men and lesbians have lived their
relationships in spite of social disaproval, and often under the threat of
incarceration, torture or death from governmental or religious persecution.
No mere lifestyle would ever prevail over such adversity. Nor would a mere
lifestyle independently occur in societies all over the world, and throughout
recorded history.
That sexual orientation is an immutable characteristic of human and animal
sexuality is the conclusive result of decades of anthropological,
psychological, zoological and sociobiological research. Not only is it not a
lifestyle, it is about as far removed from being a lifestyle as anything can
be. The phrase the homosexual lifestyle is the classical example of an
oxymoron, i.e. two words that are used together, but have the opposite
meaning (like the fiery cold, or Justice Thomas).
To put it in a less educated way, the phrase homosexual lifestyle is
nonsense. Yet the Religious Right continues to use it with persistent
malevolence, because it compresses the religious right view of homosexuality
into a single, convenient phrase. With today's soundbite-driven,
short-attention span mass media, such phrases are the stock and trade of any
successful propagandist.
The phrase homosexual lifestyle demeans and trivializes same-sex
relationships, by suggesting that they are not an expression of deep feelings
of love and companionship, but only transitory associations with no intrinsic
worth or value. It denies the true nature and depth of sexual orientation, by
relegating it to the arbitariness and shallowness of a mere lifestyle choice.
And it is an insult to the millions of gays and lesbians who have suffered
greatly during their coming-out process, and who most certainly do not need
the arrogant, condescending advice of religious fanatics who think that who
we love can be changed as easily as having a hot dog with mayonnaise instead
of with ketchup.
Suggestions for countering the rhetorical device of the homosexual lifestyle.
1. Ask for a definition of the word lifestyle. If none is forthcoming, supply
one of your own. I suggest habits of consumption, dress and recreation.
2. Ask for a detailed characterization of the homosexual lifestyle. What
movies do homosexuals see? What soap do they use? What cars do they drive?
What toppings do they have on their pizza?
3. If there is a homosexual lifestyle, there must also be a heterosexual
lifestyle. Ask for a description of the heterosexual lifestyle. Also ask your
opponent why he or she chose the heterosexual lifestyle, and under what
circumstances. Ask for the exact date it happened. If your opponent can't
remember the date or the circumstances, inquire why the details of such a
monumental decision would have slipped from memory.
4. Point out that no one in their right mind would choose a lifestyle that
makes one subject to all kinds of discrimination, constant harassment and
vicious namecalling. Why would anyone want to be a second-class citizen,
legally banned from marrying, and in some states, thanks to archaic sodomy
laws, even officially be considered a habitual criminal?
5. Ask why some animals seem to choose the homosexual lifestyle as well.
6. When a Christian fundamentalist asks why you or someone else doesn't
"leave the homosexual lifestyle", ask back why he or she doesn't leave the
Christian lifestyle.
"Rampant homosexuality, a sign of cultural decadence and moral decline from
Rome to Weimar, is celebrated as our first lady parades up Fifth Avenue to
share her �pride� in a lifestyle ruinous to body and soul alike." Pat
Buchanan, 8/10/2000
Fact: Under Emperor Hadrian [A.D. 117-138], who was gay, the Roman Empire
enjoyed its greatest security, prosperity and stability. The decline of the
Empire roughly coincides with Christianity becoming the state religion. The
middle ages, when Christianity ruled absolute, are rightfully considered the
dark ages of humanity. The age of enlightenment started when Christianity
lost its grip on society. History teaches us an undeniable lesson: if
anything, then rampant Christianity is a sure sign of cultural decadence and
moral decline.
"If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during
which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he
would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian
to the accession of Commodus." [A.D. 96-180] Edward Gibbon, Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776
Conservative Myths About HIV and AIDS
A recent Salon article by right-wing provocateur David Horowitz neatly
summarizes conservative myths about HIV and AIDS. Horowitz charges that the
"gay establishment" and a sympathetic Democratic party have caused the
disease to "spread like wildfire", and that "proven public health methods"
("testing, reporting, contact tracing and infection-site closing") could have
prevented the disease, but were "vetoed" by the gay activists. He concludes
that
(..) the AIDS epidemic is more accurately described as a product of the gay
rights movement of the 1970s, inevitably concentrated in the very centers of
gay life in America -- San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles -- and
impossible to conceive without the presence and agitations of the radical gay
movements that directly preceded it. It was the gay radical left that defined
promiscuous anal sex with strangers in public urban environments -- the
primary cause of the AIDS epidemic -- as "gay liberation."
Horowitz then gets it partially right when he states that AIDS education are
completely ineffective, because they refused to specify "anal sex as the
primary sexual transmission route", and instead addressed the general public
Myth #1: "Proven Public Health Methods" could have stopped the HIV/AIDS
epidemic
Medical tests are not 100% accurate. A test for a medical condition that
gives a yes/no answer can fail in two ways:
1. It can fail to detect the condition even though the individual tested has
the condition. This is called a false negative.
2. It can detect the condition even though the individual tested does not
have the condition. This is called a false positive.
In the case of HIV testing, false negatives are mainly caused by the
"diagnostic window" of the available tests (that only detect HIV antibodies
but not the virus itself). Based on an average seroconversion time of 3
months and life expectancy with HIV infection of 13 years, the overall false
negative rate of HIV testing has been estimated to 1.9% (reference).
False positive rates for combined ELIZA/Western Blot tests are low, and
therefore often assumed to be zero.
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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