<You live in southern California and I live in central Pennsylvania. Suffice to say that the gay people we meet might be somewhat, um, different in style, if not in orientation.

Believe me when I tell you that housing and job discrimination are serious problems here.



I live in Northern California, and I see your point. Up in "The City" (I live a good forty miles south of San Francisco, thank God,) a gay who has fewer than twenty piercings is considered a hopeless square. I also failed to remember that you live in an enclave of not just Paleo conservatives, but PreCambrian conservatives. Around here anyone who even looked crosseyed at someone for being gay would have his ass handed to him on a plate. Frankly, most people here don't give a damn one way or another anyhow.

I'm certainly not advocating any kind of public "scarlet letter" arrangement, or any kind of quarantine. That's the kind of thing people like Fidel Castro, worshiped by the Left, do.



Thank you.

First of all, for the thousandth time, as I restrain myself from making gratuitous remarks about the Klan, please do you likewise in reference to my side of the aisle. If the world were to judge conservatives by people who love Pinochet, you would be less than thrilled, I'm sure.



This doesn't quite fly. First of all, I wasn't talking about you. I'm talking about the university professors, the newspaper columnists, and the TV commentators who strut their sympathies for gays at the same time as they tell us what a wonderful person Castro is ("have you seen their literacy rate?") The people who call the shots on the Left in this country are a heck of a lot more sympathetic towards Castro and other socialist tyrants than the movers and shakers on the right are sympathetic towards the Klan. BTW, the only former Klansman in the Senate is a Democrat.

Conservatives are dragged across the coals for giving speeches at Bob Jones University. Jimmy Carter shakes hands with Castro and everyone thinks it's swell.

And like I've NEVER heard conservatives called Nazis (not often here, though).

Second, you doubtless remember that, in the late '80s and early '90s, the cry went up from the religious wing of the conservative camp to round 'em up and quarantine 'em, just like the tuberculosis victims, because sin made them sick. Fortunately, Mary Fisher's powerful speech to the Republican National Convention in 1992 shut them up in shame. Apparently, Castro has a lot in common with them, and he had the power, if no more right, to act on his thoughts. But zealots often have objectives in common, even though their philosophical justifications can be as different as night and day.

Do you honestly think any mainstream Republican would take talk of quarantine camps seriously? Or that it would have been adopted as a platform plank if Mary Fisher hadn't given a speech? We haven't hauled a minority into camps since Roosevelt, and it ain't going to happen now. The difference between the Left and the Right in this country is not that they both don't have crackpots. It's that on the Right, the crackpots aren't in charge of the movement.

Proposition 64 in California, an AIDS quarantine measure backed by the looney Lyndon LaRouche, was universally condemned by not only Democrats, but Republicans, the Republican governor, and conservative think tanks. It was blown out of the water by a 2 to 1 margin.

I stand by my statements that today, with the information available, and with a few specific exceptions, anyone who gets AIDS does so because they have done something stupid, or because someone concealed information from them (did Fisher know her husband had been a drug abuser when she married him?) I don't know if any states require an HIV test before marriage, but it would probably be a damn good idea whether it's required or not.

Does this mean we should condemn AIDS victims, or claim they have no right to sympathy because they were essentially responsible for their own situation? Of course not. A smoker with lung cancer deserves sympathy too, but unlike many AIDS activists he can't stick the blame on "society" or the lack of government action for his plight. Oh wait. I guess nowadays he can.

A bit of good news: Fisher's two sons are apparently healthy and HIV-negative. One hopes that she will live to see them grow up, and with any luck, see her grandchildren. She is apparently doing a lot of good work.