John Cardinal O'Connor
WARNING: The subject matter in this post deals candidly with sexually transmitted infections and diseases and their modes of transmission. Minors and persons easily upset by the nature of such discussion are advised to skip over this post.
Cretins. No other word better encompasses those who set their sights on John Cardinal O’Connor and the American Catholic Hierarchy for their refusal to advocate condom usage as a means of attenuating the impact of HIV/AIDS, especially in light of the steady news stories published in The New York Times during those years. What other word encompasses a whole movement of people who reject Apostolic Authority, distort the plain meaning of the Scriptural injunctions against homosexual and extramarital sex, and then disrupt Mass and desecrate the Blessed Sacrament and a cathedral all because the Apostolic Successors would not bend to their will?
What word better encompasses a group who divested themselves and their community of any personal responsibility for their sexual behavior and its consequences, projecting onto Rome all culpability? Narcissist describes a great deal, but is insufficient when one considers the venom spit at the Church.
As has been demonstrated conclusively in Part I, Part II and Part III, these people had it wrong. Terribly wrong. Tragically wrong. In the early days of the pandemic, gays were being told to lubricate their condoms to facilitate intercourse and reduce strain on the condom which might cause rupture.
Then they figured out that petroleum jellies dissolved the latex, presumably after more disease was transmitted through those condom ruptures.
Then, unthinking, untrained and uncritical activists led the charge for using nonoxynol-9 (N-9), the spermicide that was shown to kill HIV in test tubes (In high doses, a fact they missed), as a lubricant to back up condom efficay, should the condom slip or tear. For whatever reason, it wouldn’t be until several years later that N-9 would be shown to be completely ineffective against the virus in the low concentration used on condoms, and causes ulcerations in the vaginal and rectal mucosa, actually facilitating HIV transmission in case of condom failure.
Were all of that not enough, Part III presented CDC’s own data on condom ineffectiveness.
Seldom in the history of medicine has a movement been so vocal, so organized, and so catastrophically wrong. The public health community has done a slow walk back from those early days of ACT-UP’s message of certitude.
They have abandoned “Safe” sex for the more qualified “Safer” sex.
They have abandoned advocating N-9 as both lubricant and fail-safe.
They have all but abandoned the condom as effective against much of anything in the way of STI’s.
They have embraced the language of abstinence and long-term mutual monogamy as the surest ways of preventing STI’s, including HIV.
In presenting themselves as the true shepherds of the sexually licentious in the face of a killer disease, in establishing the corollary narrative that the Bishops were out of touch old celibates consigned to history’s dustbin, ACT-UP and their fellow travelers no doubt unwittingly led scores of thousands to HIV infection and death.
Theirs is a bitter, shameful legacy.
The Bishops for their part spared no expense in creating hospital and nursing home beds for AIDS patients and received them with compassion. One of those leaders of the desecration converted to the Catholic Church on his death bed and entered eternity sealed with the sacraments. The Bishops would not be swayed by the bad PR, and stayed faithful to their Church, their Office and their God.
It is Cardinal O’Connor’s message that the science has borne out:
“Good morality is good medicine.”
(The promised article on abstinence is itself a new series entitled, “Abstinence Education (Part I)”
Coming Home 
A lot of good points here. Narcissism is a good word to apply. There have been, in American history, a number of atrocious uses of state power to impose utterly irrational, but sometimes lucrative, prejudices of one interest group upon another, or to set up petty tyrants to indulge in narrow-minded rule over their own little bailiwicks. Making the most general use possible of the language developed in a number of justifiable struggles, in the courts and on the street, against these prejudices and arbitrary acts, various people have developed the following untenable logic:
1) I should have whatever I want.
2) The State should not punish me for it.
3) Nobody should intimidate me about it.
4) There should be no material consequences for my choices, not from nature, not from God, not from anything at all.
5) If you tell me there are real consequences, you are a bigot, and you don’t like me.
We can restrain the exercise of state power, we can restrain the use of other concentrations of power, such as the use of irrelevent prejudice in employment decisions, but life is real, and if you can’t deal with that, nobody can help you.
Those who believe condoms will do them some good have every legal right to use them. Those who believe condoms will do more harm than good have every right to say so. For any group to set their sites on someone because their target declines to ADVOCATE for what the group believes is ludicrous. It is the intellectual and moral equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition, although without the raw power to systematically execute thousands of people. Cardinal O’Connor has no obligation to agree with anyone or anything on any matter, just because they believe they are right. If he wants to be a Cardinal, he has an obligation to his church, but he chose to enter the priesthood.
Who knows? The church’s way may actually save more lives. Or it may not. That’s one reason we have free speech and fifty state governments and voluntary association in this country. Let everyone who thinks they have a good idea offer it, in public, and let people choose. It is a good thing that the Roman church offers an alternative. If it doesn’t work, people don’t have to follow it. Individuals who want to put petroleum jelly on condoms, or put N-9 on condoms, or use condoms without lubricant, or engage in sexual intercourse without condoms, are free to do so.
It is of course irrefutable that any two individuals who engage in monogamous sexual intercourse, neither of whom had an STD when they began, and neither of whom violates their mutual commitment, will never be infected by an STD. The church didn’t invent that fact, it was observable when the first moral laws began to appear in human cultures. For that matter, if fifty people with no STD among them maintained the discipline and integrity to engage in random promiscuous sex only within the group, and nobody violated that discipline, none of them would be infected by an STD either. It seems nobody has ever assembled a group of fifty people who could reliably maintain such discipline.
I myself reject Apostolic authority. That doesn’t give me the right to interrupt a service filled with people who have voluntarily chosen to accept it, assembled in a building paid for by the voluntary donations of people who have accepted it. It’s a free country.
Good points and info doctor. Consider including a disclaimer/warning at the beginning of each of your posts to this thread to advise parents and younger readers on the mature nature of the material. Just a thought.
Thanks Rev.
Done it!
[…] Part I Part II Part III Part IV […]
[…] Part II of this series (Part I here. Part II here. Part IV here.) we examined the disconnect between ACT-UP’s rhetoric on condoms and the published reports in […]
[…] Read Part I, <strong>Part III, Part IV. […]
[…] Part II here. Part III here. Part IV here. […]
As often is the case, I am so glad to see the information you provide. Oh, if only people would be willing to read, understand and consider it. If only young people could know this…