FogCityJohn #fundie dailykos.com

[Mangum was arraigned earlier today on charges of recklessly infecting another person with HIV. He's in a world of trouble, to say the least. In Missouri, knowingly exposing someone to HIV without the other's consent can carry up to 15 years in prison, and infecting someone can send you to prison for life. I hope they throw the library at this guy. There's really no such thing as too heavy-handed a sentence for something this outrageous.]

Really?

Do you know much about the laws criminalizing nondisclosure of one's serostatus? They usually don't require that a victim be infected before criminal liability attaches. And with many of them, the fact that you have an undetectable viral load (and are therefore highly unlikely to infect anyone) and that you used a condom are no defense. So you can be on meds with a fully suppressed viral load and use a condom and not infect your "victim," and still go to jail. Not to mention that the laws single out HIV for special punishment.

Laws like these are one of the reasons many people who may have been exposed to HIV don't get tested. They're a public health disaster. No one should be cheering a prosecution under such draconian legislation.

And by the way, people who are HIV-negative bear a little responsibility in this too. No one should simply take a person's word that he's uninfected. A large percentage of people with HIV are unaware of their infection (in part because laws like this are a powerful disincentive to testing). This is particularly true among us gay men, and unless he's been living under a rock since the 1980s, every gay man has heard the message that you have to treat every sex partner as positive.

[...]

FFS, these are gay men we're talking about. Something like 20% of us are positive. If you decide to have unprotected sex with someone whose serostatus you have not verified through testing, then you are simply assuming the risk of infection. Clearly, Magnum's "victims" weren't all that concerned about it.

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Confused?

So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

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