From Some Bloke's link: fewer than three people per thousand are living with HIV in the UK. Now that is not good, but it isn't a plague either.

Another thing: 95% of people with HIV acquired it via sex without a condom. Cor. So what can we draw from that? Lessee:

Ban gay marriage? Yes or no? If yes, tell us how that would help.

Herd gay men into clinics for compulsory testing? Yes or no? If yes, what do we then do with the HIV-positive guys? And could the negative guys, a huge majority of those tested, sue us for false arrest or something like that?

Provide freely-available cheap or free condoms along with advice? Yes or no?

Radically improve sex and relationships education in schools (a disgrace at the moment)? Yes or no? (I seem to remember Ake dismissing that as irrelevsnt...)

The facts and figures should be there to inform our next practical moves in order to reduce the incidence of infection, not provide a platform from which homophobes and assorted moralisers can triumphally preach their bigotry. HIV is a primarily a practical issue, as is abortion, not a moral one, and it needs practical solutions. When I was at school, both as a pupil and later as a teacher, the people who, on the whole, were by far the most damaging in terms of relationships education were the people who thought sex was mostly a bad thing most of the time, that is, the nuns and priests. Far from helping, they just got in the way of progress. In the same way, the last people we need to be listening to on the matter of HIV rates are told-you-so homophobes, of whom we have a prime example in our midst, to the eternal shame of this forum.