If you think that's verbal abuse then I feel sorry for you. Homosexuals have not been "bombarded with information". They have to go and get the information for themselves. If schools treated gay people the same as everyone else in good programmes of education for personal relationships, gay people, like everyone else, would come into the bigger world well-equipped to find the information they want. All too often they don't (which was the point of my longer post, actually, that you referred to as "garbled"). The evidence is all too obvious, in the shape of high rates of unwanted pregnancies and abortions and of the frighteningly-high incidence of unprotected sex. Your attitude is to put the information out there too late, when the problems have become all too apparent, and say take it or leave it. Conscience cleansed!

As for the use of the word gay, the fact that you're uncomfortable with it, in spite of its having just the one meaning these days unless you want to set everyone off giggling, speaks volumes about your resentment and intolerance of homosexuality. And you call it a euphemism for homosexuality. You know what a euphemism is? A less bad way of characterising something bad, that's what. A way of playing down the badness. So you think homosexuality is bad and you don't think it deserves a kinder word for itself. That's what you're saying, apparently. It's what we call homophobia and your remarks demonstrate plenty of symptoms of it.

As for the statistics, it is not true that infection "rates" in the UK are climbing "steadily". In fact, in the mid-noughties there was a decline in new diagnoses of HIV in spite of much improved diagnostic techniques and public knowledge. And we have now had HIV/Aids with us for well over 30 years that we know of, yet the number of HIV-positive people in the UK is under 100,000, fewer than one in 600 of the population (and by no means all will develop Aids). Yet the pundits tell us that anything between one in 20 and more than one in ten of us may be not solely sexually interested in the opposite sex. Hmm. Not much of a gay plague then, is it? Of course, scaremongering is simply another aspect of homophobia.