In an article I found in the back pages of today's Inquirer, Jesse Jackson spoke at an AIDS conference in Philadelphia yesterday where he criticized pharmaceutical companies for their emphasis on AIDS treatment instead of a cure:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, speaking at an AIDS conference in Philadelphia, yesterday called for more funding for research to find "a cure" for AIDS.

The civil rights activist was particularly critical of pharmaceutical companies that make drugs to treat HIV/AIDS. He urged the hundreds of medical professionals and AIDS activists in his audience at the National Conference on African-Americans and AIDS to buy stock in drug companies and attend stockholders' meetings to push for "a cure," instead of the cocktail of drugs used to treat the AIDS virus.

"They may have an interest in more medicine and less cure," Jackson told the conference at the Sheraton Philadelphia City Center Hotel, which is next door to GlaxoSmithKline's U.S. headquarters. "Ultimately we don't want the medicine. We want the cure."

Since 1987, when the first HIV treatment was approved, the medical arsenal has grown to more than 26 drugs. Although the drugs can have serious side effects, combinations of therapies have turned HIV from a death sentence into a chronic illness.

Jackson did not mention that the conference, now in its ninth year, is partly underwritten by some pharmaceutical companies. GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer are among the major sponsors of Minority Healthcare Communications Inc. in Fogelsville, Pa., the nonprofit health-education organization that produces the conference.

I'm not sure exactly who Jackson means by "we," but I think almost anyone infected with AIDS would prefer a cure to an extended treatment regimen consisting of a daily "cocktail" of half a dozen or more drugs of unknown long-term efficacy.

I don't think a cure is as likely as a vaccine, and I think one of the most interesting areas of research ought to involve mapping out the exact mechanism which allows some Northern Europeans to be immune to AIDS. For what I think is a combination of reasons, this selective natural immunity is not getting the attention it should.

High on the list of reasons is, I believe, the moral disruption which might be caused by a public perception that a deadly venereal disease might be racially selective.

A shame, really, because through genetic engineering, the mutation which causes selective European immunity could be mapped out and marketed as a vaccine. If this theory pans out, the rest doesn't take much imagination:

...some people have a mutation where we are missing the CCR5 protein is missing on some, or all, of macrophages. If you don't have the CCR5 protein, then the AIDS virus can't enter your cells. This mutation is most common among the people in Northern Europe. 14% of Swedish people have the mutation, and so are missing the CCR5 docking protein in some, or all, of their white blood cells - and have some degree of immunity to the virus that causes AIDS. But as you head geographically south and east, the mutation becomes less common. It's present in about 4.5% of Greeks, about 2% of Central Asians, and it's totally absent in people from East Asia, from Africa, and from Native Americans. These people are genetically very susceptible to the AIDS virus.

What do I mean by moral disruption? It is my theory that sexual morality only masquerades as right and wrong. Concepts like "absolute truth" (tough to apply to genital functions regardless of how hard "we" try) are the window dressing. From a social engineering perspective, what counts is that people don't do things like get pregnant without having families to support the kids, acquire fatal communicable diseases, or even freak out because they cannot go about their business without being distracted by high-profile public displays of sexuality. Whether these displays are disgusting, appalling, titillating or irresistibly attractive isn't the point. It's the old "don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses" rule.

This is why people from the "old school" of morality once considered the idea two men walking down the street holding hands infinitely more threatening than thousands of closeted gay men screwing discreetly in their bedrooms. Women being able to avoid pregnancy by simply taking a daily pill was infinitely more threatening than unwanted pregnancy, because it gave birth to new social meme that pregnancy resulted not from immoral behavior, but by neglecting to take a pill.

It's not morality, but order. The two often get confused. I think that right now America is so steeped in cultural morality of the identity politics variety that the idea of a sexually transmitted but racially discriminatory disease is just too much.

For starters, how might a leader like Jesse Jackson speak to such a disease?

There was a bit more to his remarks than the Inquirer reported, and a local ABC news affiliate provided a closer look:

Reverend Jesse Jackson spoke in Center City with more than 5 hundred health care providers who work with people who have HIV and AIDS. They're at a national conference on African Americans and AIDS.

African Americans make up 13-percent of the U.S. population.

But according to a Kaiser Foundation study they represent 50-percent of the countries newly diagnosed HIV/AIDS cases. The rate of new AIDS cases among African Americans is 10 times higher than among whites.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson said, "There's a certain sadness because expanding HIV is preventable."

Conference organizers blame misinformation, drug abuse and cultural inhibitions that lead to "down low" or hidden male-to-male sexual activity by men who also have sex with women. Some of that behavior can reportedly be traced to overcrowded jails.

Another factor is simply risky sexual behavior.

"Clearly more loose behavior leads to more loose results. And what we're being fed through mass media is that sex without love is alright," said Jackson.

I think it might be more accurate to say that over the past few decades it has become possible to decouple sex from love, that many people have done that, and that the media reflects it. To what extent it "fuels" it, I do not know. Individual people may be fueling it themselves.

I for one hate rap music. Even more do I hate gangster rap. But when I ran a nightclub in the early 90s, I was under relentless pressure to have rap shows. I resisted the pressure to the extent I could, not out of any genuine sense of moral outrage, but because I didn't want violence or rioting in the club, and because I just plain didn't like the music.

But suppose I had been running a record and CD store. Not selling rap music would have been economic suicide. Who's fault is that? The media? Somehow, I don't think so. The media simply reflect what's there, and if some idiot wants to drive around emitting gangster rap from a $1500 car stereo, no one is making him do it. Yet at the same time there are countless entrepreneurs competing with each other to sell the idiot the equipment which will annoy the general public and probably damage his hearing for life. (I'm just waiting for someone to sue the recording/electronics industry for hearing loss!)

Comments like Jackson's remind me of why Islam is spreading in the black community.

How this will be affected once the demagogues realize that AIDS is a racist disease, I don't know.

But morality always seems to lag behind scientific knowledge.

Science couldn't care less about the morally disruptive news that white immunity to AIDS has roots in the Black Death:

According to the researchers the mutation is absent in Africa and throughout East Asian populations and evident in varying amounts across Europe. O'Brien explains:

'It was present as high as 15% in Scandinavia; it was less in Europe, about 10% in France, Germany and England. Further south it was 5% and in Saudi Arabia and Sub-Saharan Africa it was 0%.'

Believing that this 'genetic drift' was probably not random, the scientists looked to their history books to find out when this mutation was last prevalent in human history and what conditions may have favoured it.

Interestingly, the Black Death hit the Islamic world a lot harder than it did Christendom

Although the devastation the Plague brought to Europe in terms of lives lost was immense, the Islamic world arguably suffered more, because plague epidemics kept returning to the Islamic world up to the 19th century. Muslim populations thus never recovered from the losses suffered because of the Plague, a demographic shift that arguably helped Europe to surpass the Islamic world's previous superiority in scholarship.

In Christian Europe, people believed that the plague was punishment from God for the sins of all Christians. The Christian doctrine of original sin also factored into the European view of the plague, because they believed that the disease was God's punishment to humans for having been born in sin. Also, death was always treated as punishment in Christian Europe, and the idea that the widespread death caused by the plague might be due to something other than God's wrath was not considered.

Islamic theology held different views about the plague. Muslims agreed with Christians that the disease was the work of God, but they did not necessarily view it as a punishment. Muslims preserved their belief in a compassionate and merciful God, and thus they believed that death from the plague was an offer of martyrdom from God.

I want to return to Jackson's complaint about the message that "sex without love is alright."

Why should the evil media stop there? How about sex without passion? Sex without people? Cyber sex? What if pornography is taking the people out of the sex? What if sex bots and droids became so real you might just prefer them to the real thing?

Or is it immoral to remark that you can't get AIDS from a robot?

I don't think there's anything written in any religious text about it, so the moral arguments will have to be found elsewhere.

(No, I will not ask Leon Kass!)

NOTE: My thanks to Clayton Cramer for his earlier comment he left about AIDS immunity.