New CDC data confirms that monkeypox overwhelmingly occurs in men who identify as gay or bisexual and who engage in risky sexual behavior—yet LGBT activists have said it is “not moral” to ask men to refrain from sex until the government can get the virus corralled.
Virtually all cases reported through last month involved men who have sex with men. “Among U.S. monkeypox cases with available data, 99% occurred in men, 94% of whom reported recent male-to-male sexual or close intimate contact” within three weeks before they developed symptoms, according to CDC report released on Friday.
Of that number, one-third of men said they had sex with five or more partners in the previous three weeks. In all, 27% had sex with one other male sexual partner; 40% reported two to four partners; 14% reported five to nine partners; and 19%—nearly one in five—reported 10 or more sexual partners within the previous 21 days.
The report also noted that monkeypox infections often took place in group settings: 38% “reported group sex, defined as sex with more than two persons, at a festival, group sex event, or sex party,” according to the CDC data, which cover May 17 through July 22.
The Biden administration’s survey confirms a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last month, which found “98% of the persons with infection were gay or bisexual men” and that transmission “was suspected to have occurred through sexual activity in 95% of the persons with infection.”
While the CDC explains that “the best way to protect yourself and others is to avoid sex of any kind,” it also recommends having virtual sex or “having sex with your clothes on.” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also counseled “for the moment, reducing your number of sexual partners.”
Despite such a stark number of monkeypox cases tied to homosexual or bisexual activities, the notion that men who identify as gay should momentarily abstain from having sex hardly received a hearing from the LGBTQ community, the public health establishment, and the legacy media. At best, a number of men offered to restrain themselves to “sex pods”—having group sex with the same people. Some LGBT activists denounced the notion of chastity as immoral.
Public “messaging from the CDC and others suggesting gays people simply have less—or distanced —sex has been met with eye rolls by many in the community,” admitted two self-described “queer” writers, Chris Stedman and Aditya Chandorkar, in a recent GQ article.
They asserted that “calling for abstinence is not effective. It’s also, we would argue, not moral to tell queer people, who have been told time and again by the world not to fulfill what is a basic human need, to simply do so again.”
Christian conservatives say that response confirms their contention that public health often rests on public ethics. “This is not just a medical issue. This really is a moral issue,” said David Closson, director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at the Family Research Council, on Friday’s episode of “Washington Watch.”
He accused health officials of engaging in “moral evasion” in order “to avoid the unfortunate reality that there are certain types of behaviors that are making this disease so rampant in certain communities. It’s not bigoted to point out basic facts of science and epidemiology.”
Sexual continence would have prevented all but 6% of known U.S. monkeypox cases, yet The Washington Post reported: “Sex is a major driver of the global outbreak. But health officials and longtime HIV activists say calls for abstinence don’t work.” The paper quoted one such official, WHO advisor Andy Seale, urging politicians to share monkeypox data in “a stigma-free, moral-free, not-making-any-judgments manner.” Yet epidemiologist Dr. Andrew G. Bostom recently told “Washington Watch” that any honest analysis would reveal that the monkeypox “outbreak has been fueled … by gay bacchanalia.”
Not only have leaders in the areas most affected by the virus refused to call on men who identify as gay to exercise self-restraint, they have not even canceled public LGBT events. On Sunday, San Francisco continued its annual “Up Your Alley Fair.”
“Located in front of the legendary Powerhouse bar, an anything-goes gay leather bar, nearly 15,000 fellow leather men and fetish enthusiasts engage in BDSM play at over 50 adult vendor spaces!” explains a gay website. “Spanking, punching, whips and floggers, bondage, domination and submission, creative water-sports, toys and so much more are in full effect.” The San Francisco AIDS Foundation advised the event is the place to “get your fill of hot hairy daddies, hungry pigs, BDSM babes and kinks of all kinds.” The foundation’s mascot—“Douchie,” an animated douche — shared “some hot tips for a fun and filthy weekend—free of anxiety.” None involved abstinence. It closed by telling readers, “You may choose to use one or two of these suggestions—or none at all.”
The foundation did not explain how taking no precautions would slow the spread of monkeypox.
The openness to willingly risk exposure to the extraordinarily painful virus shows the emptiness at the center of the gay lifestyle, said Joseph Sciambra, a former porn star and escort who left the lifestyle after his converting to Christianity. “Straight people wonder why gay men risk their lives in the midst of the monkeypox endemic, in order to take part in a sex fair,” he said. “Many Christians rightly wanted to attend church during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s the same thing. For some gay men these events are religious experiences.”
California Democrats apparently regard the hypersexualized thirst for large numbers of anonymous sexual partners as deserving of greater protection than actual religion. California Governor and potential 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Gavin Newsom fought all the way to the Supreme Court to defend a COVID-19 lockdown order keeping churches closed in his state.
Yet the Bay City’s left-wing political leadership has greeted monkeypox with exceptionally lax personal demands. “If people want to have sex, they are going to have sex,” California state Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat, told the Post. “People will make their own decisions about their own risk levels.” he tweeted, “Lecturing people not to have sex isn’t a public health strategy. It didn’t stop HIV—it made it worse—and it won’t stop monkeypox.” Wiener also called closing gay bathhouses in the 1980s “an epic blunder.”
That’s a significantly more laissez-faire attitude than he took toward the coronavirus. In February, Wiener and Assemblyman Buffy Wicks, a Democrat, co-authored a bill that would mandate every employer in California require every employee to receive the COVID-19 vaccination. “The path to normalcy is through broad vaccination. Period,” Wiener tweeted.
“It is difficult to follow the science, as we were repeatedly told to do [during COVID-19], when we consistently see the science so faithfully following the politics,” said guest host Joseph Backholm on Friday.
For its part, the Biden administration, which declared monkeypox a public health emergency on Thursday, has shared LGBTQ activists’ emphasis on finding a medical remedy rather than addressing the underlying behavior spreading the virus. While the U.S. has recorded 7,509 total cases of monkeypox as of this writing, the Biden administration plans to ship out 950,000 doses of the monkeypox vaccine by September.
Liberals’ hostility toward the free exercise of religion on one hand, and the embrace of anonymous group sex on the other, reflects America’s shifting sense of priorities and what professor Charles Taylor referred to as the building blocks of a modern identity. “Increasingly, whether you identify as gay or straight in America today, we now view our sexual behaviors, our sexual desires, our sexual urges as really at the core of who we are. It’s central to your being, to your self-identification,” said Closson. Any suggestion for you “to regulate your behavior” is seen as “an assault” on the most pivotal part of our being.
As the public response to the monkeypox outbreak shows, many American political leaders consider sexuality a far more central aspect of our lives—and their jobs—than the constitutionally protected freedom of religion.
Reporting from The Washington Stand.
