February 14, 2005

Years ago, after watching a science fiction movie called “Gattaca,” I remember my wife commenting that it was not realistic to think that the film’s characters would be allowed the great sexual freedom depicted while all their other activities were being so closely monitored and restricted. I disagreed. That is exactly the direction we are headed, I told her.

I have thought for some time that Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” is much closer to reality than George Orwell’s “1984.” I believe the last years of the 20th century and the first few of the 21st have proven me right.

In “1984,” Winston Smith and his lover, Julia, are forced to meet in clandestine places for fear of discovery by “Big Brother” – the euphemistic term given the repressive, all-intrusive government of “Oceana,” one of the world’s three gargantuan superpowers – which forbids such relationships. No such repression exists in today’s world outside of the 7th century mentality of fanatical Third World Islam.

In Huxley’s novel, however, procreation has become a function of test tubes, and genetic manipulation has become the order of the day. “Motherhood” has become a dirty word and human beings are viewed as creatable, malleable and disposable. Meanwhile, the recreational misuse of sex and drugs is freely and openly encouraged. That is where we find ourselves today.

As proof, I offer up the strange cultural dichotomy at work in government and in corporate America. Sexual pleasure has been elevated to a “right,” while other personal freedoms are being eradicated. The silly idea of covering Viagra and other sex-enhancing recreational drugs in the already bloated Medicare prescription drug program is proof that this issue is out of control. Moreover, at a time when some very dangerous personal behaviors are being encouraged and lauded as “lifestyle choices,” others are now deemed worthy of statutory penalty or even cause for dismissal from one’s employment.

No greater example of this phenomenon exists than the current governmental and corporate attitudes toward homosexual promiscuity and cigarette smoking.

In recent years, federal, state and local entities have been clamoring to create laws that forbid “discrimination” against individuals who engage in homosexual acts. The most blatant of these actions was the 2003 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court known as “Lawrence vs. Texas,” wherein the court struck down the state’s anti-sodomy laws, thereby creating an individual constitutional “right” to engage in homosexual behavior. This decision has ushered in an onslaught of brazen attempts in various parts of the country – most notably in San Francisco and New York – to challenge the very definition of marriage.

Meanwhile, governmental authorities have made cigarette smoking increasingly difficult, even as these same bodies collect revenue from the very addicted smokers they are ostracizing.

But the most blatant hypocrisy in this area is in corporate America. Today, companies large and small are rushing to offer spousal insurance benefits to homosexual couples while telling smokers in their employ that they must quit or face dismissal from their jobs because they are jeopardizing their health and driving up the cost of health insurance. All this, despite the fact that the link between homosexual behavior and AIDS has been well established for more than two decades.

Now, from New York City, comes news of a promiscuous homosexual carrying a virulent new strain of HIV. This new form of the deadly virus is resistant to all known drug therapies and progresses to full-blown AIDS in a matter of months.

Those of you in leadership positions in government and in corporate America should consider this new AIDS case very carefully. While you are threatening to hard-working family men and women with pink slips because they smoke a cigarette in the privacy of their own homes, you may be insuring the “domestic partner” of this man with the new strain of AIDS. Or perhaps you are giving benefits to the “significant other” of one of the hundreds of men he has no doubt infected. Put your actuaries to work calculating what that will do to your insurance rates.

Doug Patton