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| CDC Presentation - HIV Amongst Young Males |
No one can possibly claim that those who
advocate the promotion of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV haven’t been
able to adequately spread this message. This message has undoubtedly been
widely spread.
In addition to the message advocating condom use,
condoms have also been made readily available to most people, especially in first world
countries like the USA. Yet, despite this message being so
widely communicated and condoms being made so readily available, the Centre for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the USA has published some frightening
statistics.
CDC statistics published - HIV Surveillance in Adolescents and Young Adults - show that around 95% of
young men, aged between 13 and 24 years of age, who contract HIV, did so as a
consequence of male-to-male sexual contact.
Life Site News has published an article
giving its take on these statistics. You can find it here - CDC: 94 to 95 percent of HIV cases among young men linked to gay sex.
My take is very simple:
We need to return to the good old
traditional message about sex. Sex is something special that should be reserved
for the person who you love and decide you want to spend the rest of your life
with. If you’re homosexual, it
still does not change this message: sex is not for casual
encounters. For Christians, sex is reserved strictly for marriage.
Promiscuity is hurting, maybe
even destroying society. We are fooling ourselves if we believe or try to
justify otherwise. Our common sense tells us this. We as a society need to begin frowning on promiscuity in much
the same way as we, for example, frown on drunken driving.
Promiscuity has potentially devastating consequences. It can lead to people getting HIV/Aids, as well as to a range of other problems and challenges that affect, not only the individuals involved, but society as a whole. It is not funny. It is not harmless fun. It is not anything except a sure sign of stupidity.
Even a consideration of only one of the potential consequences of promiscuity, namely HIV/Aids, makes it exceptionally obvious that we must begin to seriously
frown on promiscuity.
The CDC reports that the cost of funding HIV/Aids treatment, over the lifetime of a HIV/Aids patient, is
around $379,678. Since the CDC estimates that there are approximately 1,148,200
living with HIV/Aids in the USA, that means that the cost of treatment of
patients with HIV/Aids is going to be around $436 billion. That’s only the cost
of treatment. It ignores all the other cost impacts on society.
Now imagine the impact on countries with smaller economies,
like South Africa. To make it worse, in South Africa, unlike the USA where only a very small
percentage of the population is living with HIV/Aids, approximately 10% of the
population - about 5,5 million people - has HIV/Aids.
Why should society have to bear these financial and other consequences that result from promiscuity? If the harmful effects of HIV/Aids and all the other consequences of promiscuity could be isolated completely, so that they only affect those individuals involved, then by all means bonk anyone you please. However it is not isolated and society as a whole inevitably pays the price for promiscuity.
Society really cannot afford to just continue dismissing promiscuity as an individual life choice that has nothing to do with society as a whole.
We obviously
cannot legislate to stop promiscuity. The law is however not the only way to go about changing the norms of society. We can create a society that clearly rejects promiscuous
behaviour as a consequence of the majority of us making the effort to frown on promiscuity.
There are countless examples of behaviours that society today is fairly silent on but which it could engage to show its disapproval of promiscuity.
We could, for example, show firm disapproval at the idea of 16-year-old school going children engaging in sex, instead of just shrugging our shoulders because allegedly everyone is doing it.
We could also embrace the concept of remaining a virgin until the day you commit to spending the rest of your life with the person you love, instead of blindly endorsing the line that no one waits anymore.
We could, for example, show firm disapproval at the idea of 16-year-old school going children engaging in sex, instead of just shrugging our shoulders because allegedly everyone is doing it.
We could also embrace the concept of remaining a virgin until the day you commit to spending the rest of your life with the person you love, instead of blindly endorsing the line that no one waits anymore.
