Wanna Bet?

Americans. We willingly accept a level of risk in one area that we find horrific in another. Take, for instance, the risk posed by alcohol or cigarettes. Fifty years ago, alcohol and cigarettes were fairly innocuous diversions. Hollywood showed the good guys smoking and drinking throughout the course of nearly every movie. A drunk behind the wheel was high comedy. On the other hand, the industry that embraced a drink and a smoke forbad any scene where a man and a woman shared a bed.

Times change. Now, movie plot devices have flipped. Martinis and cigarettes are out. Casual sex is in. We've made progress, right?

Well, let’s see. Grab a calculator and a copy of any United States statistical abstract published in the last thirty years. Now, turn to the section on law enforcement. Write down the number of people ticketed for driving under the influence. In the year 2000, for instance, that number would be 915,900. Now, in the section on transportation, find the number of fatal accidents: 37,409: forty percent of these, or 14,963, involved alcohol. So, what percentage of drunk drivers were involved in a fatal accident? Divide the second number by the first: 1.6%. Here's the funny thing. It doesn’t matter what year you choose. In any given year, between one and two percent of drunk drivers are involved in fatal accidents. This is considered very dangerous.

Keep in mind, 1.6% is artificially high. After all, most people involved in fatal accidents are caught, while many people who drive drunk are not. But let’s say 1.6% was perfectly accurate. Now, compare the failure rate of drunk drivers with the failure rate of the best contraceptives. The pill, the patch; no matter what you look at, they all have the same user failure rate: around 2-3%.

So, consider two women: one is on the pill, and one is drunk. The contraceptor has sex, the drunk drives home. The contraceptor is twice as likely to become pregnant as the drunk is to kill someone. We laud the first woman for her “responsible” sexual habits, and lambaste the second as a positive danger to society.

Drunk drivers make up 0.5% of the driving population. They cause thirty percent of all accidents. That’s pretty bad. Happily, there are less than a million drunks on the road. There are eleven million unmarried women using contraception, eleven million women who don’t know their contraceptive device is twice as likely to leave them pregnant as a drunk driver is to leave someone dead.

You may consider this misogynistic. Why didn’t I compare men? Alright, let’s do that. Consider a man who uses a condom versus one who drives home drunk. Condoms have between a ten and thirty percent failure rate. So “safe sex” is between ten and thirty times more likely to have life and death consequences than drunk driving is.

Of course, we’re only looking at pregnancy here. We are ignoring all the STDs that the condom does not protect against, like genital warts or human papilloma virus, which is responsible for 93% of all cervical cancers. We are also ignoring those STDS which condoms provide little protection against like gonorrhea, herpes and chlamydia, an asymptomatic infection which causes female infertility. We’re ignoring the costs of the STDs, we’re ignoring the cost of treating the subsequent infertility, the abortions and the post-abortion medical effects, the cancers. We’re just looking at the obvious life and death issues.

But now we’re heterosexist. So, let’s get gay. According to the thirty-one homosexual groups that filed a “friend of the court” brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the Lawrence v. Texas case (2003) that legalized sodomy, “[t]he most widely accepted study of sexual practices in the United States is the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS).” The NHSLS survey shows that 0.9% of men and 0.4% of women in the US have been engaged in exclusively same sex partnerships since they turned 18. That is, less than 1.4 million people in the US are homosexual, or about 0.5% of the population (there’s a coincidence). Let’s ignore the 10% figure the homosexual lobby pushes, and just stick with the actual results of the survey the homosexuals themselves favorably quote in their own legal document: 0.5%.

According to the Census Bureau, this 0.5% of the population is responsible for fifty-one percent of the new AIDS cases in 2001. The CDC says it costs over $150,000 to treat one AIDS case. That means the homosexual spread of AIDS by our liberated 0.5% is generating $6.5 million dollars in health costs every day. And that’s just AIDS. The other STDs together cost an additional $25 million a day, ignoring the costs involved in treating the resulting infertility, cancer, etc. By comparison, alcoholism creates roughly $20 million in daily direct medical costs.

We take car keys from drunks because they're dangerous.
We hand out condoms because they're safe.
Any questions?