THESIS:

The AIDS battle is sloppy science, AIDS is a government hoax, and that the real cause of AIDS is drug abuse and promiscuity in the homosexual community.

PROPONENTS:

The above view is promulgated by Laissez Faire Books, their book club, its publisher, their reviewer, and the "Main Feature" selection, Inventing The AIDS Virus, by Peter Duesberg (publisher not named).

SOURCE MATERIAL:

Scan of source material
OCR of source material text
LINK TO LAISSEZ-FAIRE BOOKS

INTRODUCTION:

Who are these folks? In their own words:

Laissez Faire offers the world's largest selection of books and tapes on liberty. Our selection covers the whole range of libertarian thought and interest, from Ludwig von Mises to Milton Friedman, from Christian libertarianism to free thought, from Ayn Rand to Nathaniel Branden, from Thomas Sowell to Thomas Szasz, and much more.

We know them as a leading source of classical material on individualism.

The web page http://www.lfb.org was inoperable (no server DSN) at the time we mailed our letter to the LFB publisher. It has become operable since. They are about three months behind in postings, and "Inventing AIDS" is not posted; in fact, their search engine finds no reference to keyword "gay" or "AIDS", and only a few (neutral or favorable) to keyword "homosexual". Let's call them what they are. We were surprised to see that LFB's Jim Powell had done a credible job as reviewer of the book "Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do."

COMMENTARY:

Our taste in books from this source has leaned in the past to titles on epistemology, so it was with growing interest that we watched the first signs that libertarian America was becoming aware of a gay America.

We want freedom, individual rights, and protection against a government and other citizens often in closed-door conspiracy to deprive us of liberties enjoyed by everybody else. They (the libertarians) want the same thing. Could gays be included in a "true, laissez-faire" society in which discrimination could not and would not beat out market demand and supply?

The answer, so far: Liberty is far, far too important to tamper with for the sake of a few trampled individual rights.

We were of course aware that much of mainstream American intellectualism, which professes endorsement of equal rights for everybody, exhibits a personal antipathy and private revulsion for the gay community just as consequential as we find elsewhere in prime, unwashed, backwater redneck territory. Ignorance excuses nothing, but it elegantly explains the shrill hypocritical emphasis on the word "only", and the contrasting uninspired incantation of "equal rights", in the phrase "equal rights, but only equal rights!"

We view the claim that AIDS is a hoax as second-cousin to the claim that the Holocaust never happened, and we attribute it to the same motivation. The attempted dis-accreditation of the entire gay community is necessary to establish that gay-bashings, persecution and political, social and economic disenfranchisement of gays is merely "market forces" at work. This justifies the view that "gay rights" never were a problem, and any proposed enforcement of them is "special rights", violating the individual rights of those who don't happen to like gays...

It is only by the refusal to discover the individuality and worth of gays and lesbians as completely normal Americans, that the political communities can conveniently isolate gay rights as an unacceptably "special" class of individual rights. And this is much to the liking of a conveniently large bloc of constituents who have already carved out their own status-quo turfs.

When individuals begin to think about mass violations of rights of other individuals, this herd mentality begins to break down.

America's been there before, but ... collectivism in the libertarian community? ( "Collectivism is the lowest form of racism" - Ayn Rand). Hey, hatred makes for strange bedfellows. What's interesting (and vital for survival) is to study how this happens.

OUR RESPONSE:

Letter To Laissez Faire Books

OTHER READING:

Accountable Victims: Letter to the San Mateo Times

ABOUT US:

Purpose of this paper: to rebut the opinion that the scope of AIDS is over-hyped, and of concern to special interest groups only. As such, the primary purpose of this paper is to express our own opinion and personal experience. For source material on the opinion being rebutted, see the source material cited above, or see the Christian Coalition Home Page. For source material on AIDS statistics, use a search engine such as Yahoo to locate government or educational institution statistics and analysis.

Author: Alex Forbes
Organizational Connection: webmaster, Summitlake.com. Editor, La Parola.

commentary by Alex Forbes copyright ©1996.