What rot.

A weekend activities insert in today's paper contains an adult advice column. Someone had written in asking the "experts" to talk about how AIDS is important to everyone, not just the ones who wind up as statistics.

They started out by summarizing how someone can get AIDS, and pointed out that despite the ubiquity of this knowledge, there are still 40,000 new cases each year, half of which are with people under 25. It's certainly nothing to be happy about.

Well, they feigned mystification at how prevalent the disease still is, even though everybody knows better. They were just trying to be rhetorical, but I think they actually don't understand.

"Why do so many people get AIDS with all this information out there?" the experts asked. "Can't they change their lifestyle? Maybe they could, if they had the means to do so."

What? Young people get AIDS because they don't have the resources to stop sleeping around without enough condoms? Sort of:

"Racism, sexism, and other bigotry serve to repress minorities and other disenfranchised groups. We need to overcome bigotry so no one is hit disproportionately hard by AIDS."

Oh. Not only are rich white Christians keeping condoms out of the hands of college and high school kids, they're also trying to keep them from learning about how they work 80-90% of the time, and from developing some other sort of discipline or self control that doesn't include simply refraining from sex.

I'd say this argument was flimsy, but I wouldn't want to spoil a post I have coming up on abortion.