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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, FEBRUARY 15, 1985
same cup as the [priest]. They are obviously worried that they
may have picked up the infection. But I can assure them there is
absolutely nothing for them to worry about. There is no evidence
that AIDS can be passed on in this way." •••
A man claiming to have had a long sexual relationship with
Richards telephoned a local radio station, saying he had con
tracted the killer disease.
The noted columnist for Britain's SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, Peregrine Worsthorne,
came out in his February 10 column and said what other journalists are seem
ingly afraid to say--that the spread of AIDS is primarily a moral rather
than a medical problem--despite all the hoopla over the discovery of this
and that new drug treatment. He particularly scored the failure of the
Church of England for failing to speak out against homosexual practices.
Here are excerpts of Worsthorne's column:
The lethal disease Aids could well reach epidemic proportions in
the foreseeable future, and it is high time serious attention was
given to some of the social implications of this dread develop
ment, the significance of which could be equivalent to that of
the arrival of syphilis on this side of the Atlantic in the 15th
century--imported from the Americas by Christopher Columbus's re
turning sailors••••
At the present rate of increase there could be a fatality rate
from Aids in this country of 786 a year within 18 months•••• No
description of this problem can be limited to its medical as
pects, since, unlike cancer and other fatal diseases, it is also
inescapably moral•••• Its cause is the promiscuous indulgence in
sexual practices which until recently were condemned by both
Church and State as perverted and unnatural, not to say grossly
unhygienic••••
Yet homosexuals [are] •••demanding that the Government spend more
money on finding a cure or vaccine for the disease. Their view
seems to be that society as a whole has the duty to protect them
from themselves, as if Aids was a purely medical problem, rather
than a moral one. What this view overlooks, of course, is that
there is already a moral vaccine against Aids: chastity, which
needs no taxpayers' subsidy to be made effective••••
What may be required here and now is not just a campaign warning
of the physical dangers of carefree coupling•••but also, for the
first time, some admission that such practices are morally
wrong•••• Yet such pronouncements as there are all come from doc
tors and medical officers, etc. Is it not time that the bishops
b f ought God into the�, since on � suspects that religious fana
tics--condemned by-homosexuals as ignorant bigots--who talk about
the wrath of God may know more about the cause of the disease, and
its cure, than at present do all the scientists put together?
The corollary of the State legalising homosexuality should have
been a far more rigorous and demanding effort by the Church of
England to promulgate its own strict laws governing such prac
tices. As it�, the Church did exactly the opposite, following
the State into the same morass of generalised toleration.