When our kids were growing up, my husband and I practiced something called "reality discipline." The term was coined by psychologist Kevin Leman, who posited that children need to experience the "natural consequences" of their behavior.
Leman wrote in "Making Kids Mind Without Losing Yours," "Your home needs to be a place where your kids can fail—and learn from their failure. Surround them with love, show them how important they are to you, but don’t try to undo their failures. It’s not our job as parents to get our kids off the hook.”
So, for example, if a child acts up at the dinner table, he might miss out on the family's trip to the ice cream stand afterward. If he refuses to clean his room, his toys might disappear while he's at school.
Leman's advice came to mind as I watched Elon Musk and the DOGE boys reveal the tsunami of government pork that has sent our federal deficit into a death spiral. All but the most partisan left-wing Americans are asking, "Why is the government spending money on this crap?"
One thing no one's talking about, but perhaps we should, is how much we're spending on AIDS/HIV programs.
Why are we spending $28 billion annually on an almost 100% preventable disease? Why have we sent $100 billion overseas through George W. Bush's U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to combat AIDS/HIV—much of that funneled through USAID slush funds?
Somehow, AIDS/HIV has become a third rail we're not allowed to question or even talk about. Do you want poor, helpless gays to die, you homophobic bigot?
And every year, Congress refills the coffers of programs that exist to mitigate the natural consequences of promiscuous sex, primarily between men.
In an interview after he stepped down as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci bragged:
When I took over in 1984, NIAID was a small, relatively secondary institution at the NIH, with a budget of about $350 million United States (US) dollars. Over the 38 years of my tenure, I built it up into an international powerhouse of infectious disease research with a budget of US$6.3 billion. During that time, I also set up the Division of AIDS to develop and implement the national research agenda to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The division became a major component of the institute and, in collaboration with industry, played a key role in developing the drugs that have transformed the lives of people living with HIV worldwide. [Emphasis added]
And it's not just NIAID. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation:
Medicaid accounted for 45% of all federal HIV spending in FY221 and it is the largest source of public spending for HIV care in the U.S. In FY22, the federal government spent an estimated $13 billion on Medicaid services for people with HIV. Additionally, state Medicaid spending totaled an estimated $5.4 billion in FY22. Spending has increased over time, reflecting the growing numbers of enrollees with HIV and the rising cost of care and treatment.
According to HIV.gov, out of the 31,800 new HIV infections in the U.S. in 2022, three-quarters were the result of either male-to-male sex or injecting drugs. If you include "heterosexual contact," a full 96% of new cases were related to sex or drug use. In other words, the infection is the natural consequence of certain behaviors.
The CDC even admits that "Not having sex (also known as abstinence) is a 100% effective way to prevent HIV, other STIs, and pregnancy."
So why is it that every time I turn on my TV or watch a YouTube video, I'm assaulted by gross ads showing gay and trans men cruising the streets seeking their next illicit hook-up? Instead of telling them to stop having promiscuous sex, these men are being offered a get-out-of-jail-free card called PrEP—pre-exposure prophylaxis. HIV.gov describes it as "medicine people at risk for HIV take to prevent getting HIV from sex or injection drug use. PrEP can stop HIV from taking hold and spreading throughout your body."
According to the American Journal of Managed Care:
The US government spent far more money developing tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) and emtricitabine (FTC) for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) than previously estimated, according to a study published in Health Affairs.
Based on 2022 inflation-adjusted dollars, the US government spent $314 million potentially related to TDF-FTC for PrEP development, including $143 million directly linked to development and clinical testing.
Instead of a reality check on the consequences of certain actions, our government is encouraging men to engage in high-risk behaviors—as long as they take the expensive Big Pharma drugs.
According to a consensus forecast from GlobalData’s Pharma Intelligence Centre, Descovy is estimated to yield $1.83 billion in global sales in 2029, while Truvada estimates amount to $30 million.
Meanwhile, a study partly funded by the NIH found that "45 percent of the men surveyed either inconsistently disclosed or did not disclose their HIV status to their partners" and "Men who disclosed to partners they were HIV positive were three times more likely to have sex without a condom."
I don't know about you, but I'd rather see those billions of dollars we throw at this problem every year go to curing something like pediatric cancer.
God's rules, as outlined in the Bible, exist for our provision and protection. When we choose to go outside those boundaries—one man and one woman for life, within the bounds of marriage—bad things can happen.
Just a thought, but maybe instead of encouraging (and even celebrating) risky—deadly—behavior, our government should warn men that they could die if they engage in risky sexual behavior. Stop enabling promiscuous sex with the Next Government-Funded Big Pharma Thing.
[Astute comment from JGO-KY: "It seems to be the only disease that has Civil Rights. Because one had to consent to testing, the entire health care system had to spend millions and millions on 'barriers' so that we could avoid the isolation of HIV/AIDS patients."]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr's MAHA—Make America Healthy Again—movement ought to focus some attention on HIV/AIDS funding. Poor diets and obesity are not the only public health issues that need to be addressed.
RFK Jr. wrote in his book, "The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health," "No one has ever explained how a disease largely confined to male homosexuals in the West is a female heterosexual disease in Africa.”
(It's a female hetero disease in Africa because men in some of those third-world countries are brutes who treat women as chattel, infecting them after a night "out" with the boys.)
Nevertheless, RFK Jr. assured senators in his confirmation hearing, "I absolutely support PEPFAR, and I will happily work to strengthen the program."
No questions asked.
I hope DOGE will take a no-holds-barred look at the obscene amount of money we're spending on a largely preventable disease. Is Elon Musk up to the task?
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