John Derbyshire, of NRO, was attacked by Andrew Sullivan for a comment about AIDS. I am with Derbyshire. Here is his answer.
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A FASHIONABLE VENEREAL DISEASE?
I got my knuckles rapped by several readers, including the ever-loyal Andrew Sullivan, for referring to AIDS in a piece I wrote last month as "a fashionable venereal disease," and then again, later in the same piece, as "chic." Sullivan wound himself up into high dudgeon over this, calling me a "smug, sickening bigot," and claiming that I was "spitting in the face of the sick."
Fiddlesticks. Of course AIDS is a venereal disease. What else is it? Sullivan complains that: "It can be transmitted by non-sexual means." Why, so it can. So can syphilis; so can gonorrhea; so can most diseases characterized by the presence of pathogens in body fluids. My dictionary (Merriam-Webster's Third) defines "venereal disease" as: "a contagious disease that is typically acquired in sexual intercourse." AIDS is, on that definition, a venereal disease. That it is fashionable seems to me just as indisputable. Leaf through the glamour and showbiz pages of your favorite newspaper or magazine for any period during this past 20 years. Count the number of extravagant AIDS benefits organized by, and attended by, the high glitterati of Hollywood and similar centers of fashion. Then count how many benefits these same people have put on for, say, testicular cancer. Q.E.D.
AIDS is also just about the most easily avoidable disease known to man. Unless you live a particular lifestyle, or are extraordinarily unlucky — on the scale of winning-the-lottery unlucky — AIDS is, as blogger John Ross has spelled out in detail, not your problem. Now, as Christians, we should of course feel compassion for anyone in pain, and I am certainly very sorry for anyone sick with AIDS. Few of us are sufficiently saintly to be able to encompass the entirety of human suffering, however, and it is human nature to be selective about our compassion, feeling more for some cases than for others. My own face-to-face experience of suffering has included both a little girl with leukemia and an old man who was dying from lung cancer as a result of a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit. Both were very pitiable, but I was more deeply moved by the first than by the second. On strictly Christian grounds, this partiality cannot be justified, but I doubt anyone would react much differently.
We should always do our best with the Christian virtues, and I honestly do; but faced with the sheer stupendous quantity of suffering in the world, the quite disproportionate attention given to people with AIDS — many of whom got the disease as a result of irresponsible hedonism — often seems to me, to speak frankly about it, offensive.
Nor am I alone in feeling this way, to judge from my e-mail bag. Millions of Americans are suffering in agony and destitution right now because they are afflicted with diseases that neither Barbra Streisand, nor Elizabeth Taylor, nor Michael Jackson, ever wore a cute ribbon for, and for which the U.S. Congress never passed a special bill providing free home care, including free meals, at federal taxpayers' expense. Those people, and their distraught relatives, are entitled to feel — and, they tell me, actually do feel — that their faces are being spat on by people like Sullivan, who lobby for ever more public and private money to be spent on research into AIDS, and therefore, since the supply of money is finite, subtracted from research into less fashionable diseases.
I do not begrudge AIDS sufferers my compassion, but I do begrudge them the priority they claim on my compassion — not to mention my money — for what they often suffer as a consequence of their own lust, folly, carelessness, lack of restraint, and lack of self-respect.
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