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Loading ...African MP apologizes for call to brand PWAs
05.29.2009 2:31pm EDT
(Johannesburg, South Africa) A member of Swaziland’s Parliament has apologized after calling for the branding of people with HIV/AIDS.
Earlier this week at a workshop for MPs, Timothy Myeni said that people with HIV/AIDS should have a warning branded onto their buttocks so that others who have sex with them know of their status.The suggestion drew outrage from HIV/AIDS action groups.
The tiny landlocked kingdom in southern Africa has the highest HIV infection rate in the world. Almost 43 per cent of the population is believed to be living with HIV/AIDS.
“How can a legislator lobby for the branding of HIV positive people?” asked Swazi AIDS activist Siphiwe Hlophe.
“We do not need legislators who think like him because some of the people who voted for him could be positive, why is he then discriminating them?”
Myeni, an evangelical Christian and sometime gospel singer, said his remark was “not a statement, but a question” that he posed during the HIV/AIDS workshop with government policy makers.
“I’m very sorry. If you need me to show a sign of how sorry I am, I’m ready,” the South African Press Association quoted Myeni saying after his remarks were broadly reported in South Africa.
“I’m here to withdraw those things I asked that are really bad, which I now realize,” he said.
Jeeeez…yet another christian makes an idiot of himself!!
hmmm I am not so sure this suggestion is all bad..
Branding sounds painful, but I think a discreetly placed indelible mark in the genital area (with anesthsia) could help matters a bit…
That being said, it is best to probably proceed as if everyone were positive.
However, positive poeple are to blame, because some of them are not upfront with disclosing their status to sexual partners / potential sexual partners. It should be a crime for a positive person to have sex with someone without disclosing their status.
And no doubt, the good MP will also join me in calling for all evangelical bigots to be branded with “idiot” across their forehead, to save the rest of the uniformed civilized world the trouble of assuming they sane.
Good God. Sounds like something James Dobson would come up with.
BRANDING!?! That is…unthinkable! The way to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS is through use of condoms and testing. I do not believe that those infected with HIV/AIDS should abstain from sex, but they should limit themselves to sexual partners with HIV/AIDS or use a condom.
@ Jeff
Well let’s just brand everybody, for being gay,straight,black,jewish,french,spanish,disabled,retarded,schiofrenia(msp?)then we will all be able to tell who they are and what they are trying to do. I hope you get more education before slandering the positive community. Yes, everyone should disclose their status to sexual partners. SOme positive people aren’t good for not disclosing, but branding, you ding dong is wrong.
Hate to say it, BUT, I, for one, have always supported the idea of PWA segregation from the general population.
Sorry, kids, but if we’d separated those infected from those not infected, there is no doubt the epidemic would have been stifled a long time ago.
This, of course, would have meant mandatory testing, or a law requiring ALL persons to undergo a test every three months until no person tested outside of a segragatory community showed positive.
Unfair? Maybe. Life is unfair. Getting AIDS isn’t fair. Having AIDS passed to you through either ignorance or deceit is REALLY unfair.
Before your knee jerks your foot through your forehead, think of typhoid and leprosy and a host of other epidemics which were virtually eradicated, pre-genetic research antibiotics, through such segragation/separation.
If I knew it would save the futures and lives of a hundred people, or a thousand, living the rest of my life, were I positive, within a segregated positive community would be the least horrific thing I’ve ever had to do in my lifetime.
As for personal freedoms and professions and all that jazz: Travel would be the only thing truly impossible. Anything else, career-wise, could be done within an isolated community through liasons or the ‘net.
Logistically, probably really not all that possible–so, the next best thing: Branding?
Tattoos?
yep…sounds like a winner to me.
Perhaps his “question”, or suggestion, should be turned around…especially in a country that may in the near future have a MAJORITY infected with HIV/AIDS, perhaps the non-infected should be “branded” to keep them safe? How about a “Scarlet Letter” for everyone? Now Wear it proudly into church, ya’ hear? DUMB-ASSES! Thank god stupidity is not a strictly “American” trait.