Homosexuality
I refer to a recently published column in your newspaper and the comments made by the author who is a leading educationist, intellectual, columnist, and thinker of our country. As much as I respect the author, my views on his article are diametrically different. He feels that homosexuals should be avoided, nay stopped, like they used to do to lepers and bubonic plague carriers in the middle ages. If we are to ban homosexuality, then logically this ban should also be expanded to cover all the books written by homosexual authors whose contributions to literature and philosophy have been great . Does Peter Tchaikovsky's magnum opus "The Nutcracker Suite" or "Swan Lake" sounds any less melodic because he was a homosexual? I think not. Homosexuality is not a new phenomenon, and is as old as heterosexuality. The author also makes another common mistake that AIDS had its roots in the gay community. This is a fallacy. The medical community generally agrees that AIDS originated amongst the chimpanzees and the AIDS virus at some point crossed species from chimpanzees to humans (a process referred to as zoonosis) - probably when humans killed the infected monkeys and/or ate their flesh. In any case, however, it is also true that this dreadful scourge initially spread like wildfire among two distinct groups: gays and drug users. The disease spread in these groups primarily because they were small, marginalized, close-knit communities, not for any other reason(s) par se.
Today, AIDS is on the decline among homosexuals but on the rise among heterosexuals and drug users. Sexual preference, be it homosexual or heterosexual, is one of the least understood, and most complex, of all the mysteries that confounds scientists and sociologists today.
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