What we can learn from this Metro Pulse post.
1. Stacey Campfield has some strange ideas about what airline pilots get up to in their free time.
2. While I don’t believe you should fuck Stacey Campfield just out of general principle, you should for sure now not fuck Stacey Campfield, because he doesn’t understand how sexually transmitted diseases are transmitted. And he is a grown up. With internet access. And he doesn’t think straight people can get AIDS. And he’s an elected official. In charge of making the laws that govern us. People, he’s MY AGE!!!!
3. He’s not ashamed to be out in public spouting his monkey-fucking airline pilot giving gay people AIDS which heterosexual people cannot get from heterosexual sex conspiracy theories.
My mind continues to be boggled by this nincompoop.
Filed under: Politics and Other Nonsense, The Conservative Soap Opera, The State of Tennessee
Exhibit A: why HIV/AIDS education should be taught in school along with Sex Ed.
30+ years we have been living with the HIV/AIDS epidemic and there are people out & about who have not the slightest clue how to protect themselves, but also misinform other people in the process. Some of them even manage to get elected to office.
This guy embarasses the State of Tennessee every time he speaks.
I’m surprised that THAT’s what he took away from the truth.
I assume he’s referring to Gaetan Dugas, the presumptive Patient Zero. Back when the epidemic first came to light, Dugas was deduced by epidemiologists as the primary vector. He wasn’t a pilot, though. He was a flight attendant for Air Canada (?I think) who was extremely sexually active and was presumed to have brought the disease to North America from its point of origin in Africa. He was presumed to have contracted it through sex with infected African males. The disease DID originate in monkeys but is believed to have transferred species through intravenous or fluid contact rather than intercourse, I believe. Have to double check that part.
I’ve been following AIDS since the beginning because disease interests me. Anyway, Campfield is the PERFECT example of that game of telephone, where the facts get garbled.
Coble, that’s interesting. Over at Huffington Post (ugh, yes, I know) they make mention of Jacques Pepin’s THE ORIGIN OF AIDS:
I’m just absolutely stunned that someone our age, who came up through the AIDS crisis, could think that you can’t get HIV from heterosexual intercourse. A grown man. Our age. Who, presumably has or would like to have heterosexual sex.
If anyone is interested, I recommend Randy Shilts’ _And The Band Played On_. Although it does paint Degas in a slightly hysterical light it’s an excellent read about the beginnings of the disease and its impact on the homosexual AND medical communities.
Also, I did just double-check and at no point is bestiality given as a hypothesis for cross-species transmission of sIV-HIV.
This makes me so, so mad. How can someone so blatantly stupid be elected time and time again to serve our state?
Oh, and if he thinks it’s impossible to contract AIDS through heterosexual sex, maybe he should talk to my uncle. Oh wait, he can’t. Because he died of AIDS. THAT HE GOT AFTER HAVING SEX WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND.
Agree with Beth; While Campfield’s ignorance is pretty exceptional, there still is ALOT of misinformation about HIV and AIDS and their spread and prevention. This type of thing is the very reason why comprehensive sex education is so important!
Kat, we had to watch the movie based on that book in 7th grade as part of our AIDS-education unit. (We learned about HIV/AIDS in health class—it was in the curriculum for 7th and 8th grade and it was again discussed in high school as well.)
I think it’s a great read/watch for anyone who never had any kind of education about the disease or is just interested in the beginnings of it (and how people treated other people who had it back then).
That’s also why I got certified by the Red Cross to teach HIV/AIDS awareness when I was in college because I was SHOCKED to discover just how little people knew. Stuff I took for granted as common knowledge was a complete surprise to so many people.
I have a LARGE quibble with the HuffPo piece; it seems they had a bit of reading comprehension issues with the Pepin book.
The point Dr. Pepin made time and again–a point I happen to think is crucially important–is that there is no way that sexual transmission alone could account for the rapid rates of infection. The disease was most likely propigated through reused syringes in African health clinics, and again in a clinic in Haiti.
It is crucial that this point be emphasized because a)it underscores that AIDS is not a “sexual” disease and B) it screams loudly and long at the need for better medical care in the poorer parts of the world. People are dying all over the world because health workers in Africa don’t have the money to prevent reusing syringes. Dr. Pepin himself admitted to reusing syringes.
Also, I realise folks don’t like it when I say things like this but I can’t help myself…
Things like this underscore to me that SC has some generally warped ideas about sexuality. As though sex itself is his steaming jungle of awfulness where people are ramming monkeys in a frenzied unslakeable lust.
I can vouch for “And The Band Played On” as a really great tool of educating one’s self in the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It’s horrifying to look back now at all the time that was wasted in petty gov’t red tape and people playing politics while scores of people died.
Re: the lack of education today – I can attest to this: a few years back the subject came up with a few people younger than myself – (now these people are mid-20s). They didn’t believe me when I told them HIV/AIDS was referred to in the early days as “gay cancer”. I was aghast that they missed that part and wondered how much other information had slipped by them on the topic.
I am still pretty bummed about not having moved to Knoxville as had been planned – for the obvious reasons, yep, but also very much because I was SO looking forward to getting registered to vote in Knox County so I could have hopefully helped get that idiot out of office. He is such an embarrassment to this entire state, and especially the Republicans in it, and most especially all the poor people stuck with him in KnoxCo.
PS I vote for KC’s “steaming jungle of awfulness” comment as best blog comment of 2012 already. I CANNOT stop laughing.
Stacey Campfield is Patient Zero for the nascent Idiocracy.
One day, and in my lifetime, I’m assuming that he runs for governor, and in unironic Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho style, will win.
I wish I thought I was kidding.
Aunt B.,
Thanks for this post. No matter how sad I ever become, I know that the image of Peter Graves in uniform and in the cockpit {hmmmmm?} with a chimpanzee on his lap will snap me out of it. “Do you like gladiator movies Cheeta?”
OK, I live in Texas. We have plenty of stupid and ignorant politicians. But jeeze… I hate to say it, but after reading about Tennessee’s stupid and ignorant politicians for a couple of years here, the other day I found myself telling someone that they might not want to look at jobs in Nashville.
I can’t imagine I’m the only one who’s been literally scared away from your state by yahoos like this jerk.
@Andy – I have never lived outside of Tennessee, but if Campfield ever runs for governor & wins – I’m moving. Not even kidding.
It’s kinda funny because I always thought Stacey Campfield was a closet case. He sets my gaydar off BIG time and it always seems like he doth protest way too much.
Southern Beale, I’ve thought the same thing for a while too. It would explain why he’s so obsessed with sex.
Repression.
Not that I care whether who he wants to have sex with (if at all). I do not. I expect the same in return from him, which we all know is folly.
Honestly, at this point, I kind of hope he is just a really repressed and self-loathing gay guy. That’s at least a way of being fucked up that I can wrap my head around.
But, as I’ve said a million times before, that’s not the vibe I get. To me he comes across as a straight guy who hates women and now obviously men who “act like women” sexually. So much of his legislation is about making sure that people who “catch” during sex are made as vulnerable to the negative consequences of having sex that way that I just don’t think he sees himself among us, even at some repressed level.
He’s not a person arguing that someone like him should be caught and punished.
I just wonder how he keeps his skull from imploding. I thought nature abhorred a vacuum.