2 of 3

Were you surprised by the White House's reaction?

That also is a sad part of this whole chronicle. When I heard that the White House press office had, without checking any facts, reacted to what was printed in the papers as truth, I was hurt simply because they didn't do their homework.

My wife and I love George Bush. We pray for him regularly. But it was irresponsible for the people that he surrounds himself with to misrepresent our position and to believe the lies of the gay radicals.

How do you respond to criticism of your use of phrases like deathstyle and gay plague?

First of all, the term gay plague is not something that I coined. If you do a very quick web search you'll come up with probably a couple hundred hits that show you that that term was used by the medical community and even the gays themselves in the mid-'80s to describe what was happening.

The only way that I've ever used the term gay plague was as a historical reference to what people are actually calling it. This disease was originally called GRID for "Gay Related Immune Deficiency."

The term deathstyle also is not something that's original to me. There are many things that could be characterized that way. I would say that my granddad, who smoked unfiltered Camels for 50 years, practiced a deathstyle. It caught up with him at age 78.

If you check in Pat Buchanan's books, you'll find he uses the same term for anyone who decides to have large numbers of sexual partners. They are courting death. It's been proven scientifically that multiple sexual partners and an early debut of sexual activity in teenagers increases the risk of getting HIV and the other STDs that are out there.

Whether gay or straight?

Exactly. If people do risk activities that involve the exchange of bodily fluids—male or female—sexual fluids, or blood and they contain HIV, the possibility exists for the person to become infected. Those are the scientific facts. To say that isn't the truth is to be in denial about what we know of this disease.

Have you faced antigay allegations earlier in your HIV/AIDS activism?

The only other allegations were when I spoke at a family values rally down in South Carolina. Apparently one of the gay papers down there wrote an article on me. But that was not as scurrilous as what the folks in Washington did.

I've had nothing but good experiences, really. Even at that same rally, I had two leaders within Greenville gay circles compliment me on presenting a balanced presentation of correct information. So I really can't say that I've had that many challenges or problems.

Were you surprised that executive director Patricia Ware left the advisory council last week?

I don't know if that surprised me because Pat has been a spokesperson for a basically Christian worldview on this issue for probably 10 to 15 years. The position that she was in has been politicized to the point to where I don't know that there's anything that she could do, short of adopting a totally progay agenda, that would not get her criticized.

You can only live in that kind of dynamic tension for so long. And then you have to say, "Wait a minute, what am I doing here? I'm really not accomplishing what I wanted to do," and you have to move on. So I'm not surprised. I'm chagrined a little bit simply because she is a good lady who's trying to do what I believe the purpose of the advisory council was: figuring out ways to eliminate this virus from the world.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47