Deny it loudly enough and it will not exist

    

Tennessee is moving ahead with plans to legislate a world-class workforce by banning teachers from saying "gay."
     Business leaders are, well, a little perturbed:

          Local businesses have been quietly lobbying against the legislation, fearing it may have a harmful effect on recruitment. FedEx and Dell are among the largest employers in Tennessee and both have strict non-discrimination policies.
          A spokeswoman for Vanderbilt University, Nashville's largest employer, said: "This pending legislation would not affect any of Vanderbilt's existing policies regarding faculty, staff and students. But it could impact the climate for attracting the best talent to Vanderbilt and Tennessee."

          ...Tennessee has previously passed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Last year, the state approved a bill, HB 600, that barred state bodies including schools from making laws or policies protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from discrimination. That bill passed despite stiff opposition from leaders in the state's four largest cities - Nashville, Chattanooga, Memphis and Knoxville - who were concerned that businesses might be put off from setting up in the state.

The bill's sponsor has his reasons:

        In a recent radio interview, Senator Campfield argued that sexually confused children may be "pushed into a relationship of a homosexual nature" if people are free to talk about homosexuality in schools.
          He also argued that Aids was caused by "one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men".

     One assumes the good senator hasn't reach, say, this Washington Post excerpt:

          We are unlikely to ever know all the details of the birth of the AIDS epidemic. But a series of recent genetic discoveries have shed new light on it, starting with the moment when a connection from chimp to human changed the course of history.
          We now know where the epidemic began: a small patch of dense forest in southeastern Cameroon. We know when: within a couple of decades on either side of 1900. We have a good idea of how: A hunter caught an infected chimpanzee for food, allowing the virus to pass from the chimp’s blood into the hunter’s body, probably through a cut during butchering.
          ...Ominously, something else followed the rubber trade through Cameroon: disease. Sleeping sickness, smallpox and skin infections were the most obvious.
         Colonial authorities attempted mass inoculation campaigns for smallpox and set up quarantine zones that restricted where the porters were allowed to travel. But even so, the diseases spread.
Among them was syphilis, which arrived with the Europeans. In just a few years it reached epidemic proportions along porter routes and riverside trading posts in Cameroon and throughout the Congo Basin. It’s impossible now to determine how much of this spread resulted from rapes as opposed to other kinds of encounters, but it’s clear that colonial commerce created massive new networks of sexual interactions — and massive new transmissions of infections. (In later decades, transmission through the reuse of hypodermic needles in medical care probably had some role in HIV’s spread as well.)
          So HIV’s first journey looked something like this: A hunter killed an infected chimp in the southeastern Cameroonian forest, and a simian virus entered his body through a cut during the butchering, mutating into HIV.
          This probably had happened many times before, during the centuries when the region had little contact with the outside world. But now thousands of porters — both men and women — were crossing through the area regularly, creating more opportunities for the virus to travel onward to a riverside trading station such as Moloundou.
          One of the first victims — whether a hunter, a porter or an ivory collector — gave HIV to a sexual partner. There may have been a small outbreak around the trading station before the virus found its way aboard a steamship headed down the Sangha River.
          For this fateful journey south, HIV could have ridden in the body of these first victims, or it could have been somebody infected later: a soldier or a laborer. Or it could have been carried by a woman: a concubine, a trader.
          It’s also possible that the virus moved down the river in a series of steps, maybe from Moloundou to Ouesso, then onward to Bolobo on the Congo River itself.
          There might even have been a series of infections at trading towns along the entire route downriver.      
          Yet even within these riverside trading posts HIV would have struggled to create anything more than a short-lived, localized outbreak.
          Most of this colonial world didn’t have enough potential victims for such a fragile virus to start a major epidemic. HIV is harder to transmit than many other infections. People can have sex hundreds of times without passing the virus on. To spread widely, HIV requires a population large enough to sustain an outbreak and a sexual culture in which people often have more than one partner, creating networks of interaction that propel the virus onward.
          To fulfill its grim destiny, HIV needed a kind of place never before seen in Central Africa but one that now was rising in the heart of the region: a big, thriving, hectic place jammed with people and energy, where old rules were cast aside amid the tumult of new commerce.
          It needed Kinshasa. It was here, hundreds of miles downriver from Cameroon, that HIV began to grow beyond a mere outbreak. It was here that AIDS grew into an epidemic.
          Laying the scientific story alongside the historical one offers one final revelation. In the 1920s, as railroads became widely available, the Sangha River’s value as a steamship route dwindled sharply. Global rubber prices also collapsed. The pace of human movement through the region eased.
          So the improbable journey of the killer strain of HIV was feasible for only a few hectic decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s. Without “The Scramble for Africa,” it’s hard to see how HIV could have made it out of southeastern Cameroon to eventually kill tens of millions of people. Even a delay might have caused the killer strain of HIV to die a lonely death deep in the jungle.

     One more thing, doubtless, they won't be teaching in Tennessee schools.