Posted on 12/10/2010 4:37:24 AM PST by Kaslin
Derrick Burts, 24, started working as a porn-film actor in June. By October, he'd contracted the HIV virus. The AP story on Burts contained this jaw-dropping sentence: "He said he began to have doubts about the business after contracting chlamydia, gonorrhea and herpes in his first month of work, but was convinced to keep working."
Burts claimed, "I wasn't stupid or oblivious, I knew what was out there. But it's not something you think about when they fill your head" with lucrative offers and promises that the work is safe. Lured into the porn world with the promise that he looked like money, Burts concluded his greed was unwise: "Making $10,000 or $15,000 for porn isn't worth your life."
Michael Weinstein, head of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, took up the Burts case. While he insisted his group isn't anti-porn, "we are astounded that the multi-billion-dollar film industry and its fig leaf of a clinic could not even get it together six weeks after his first HIV-positive test to link (Burts) to appropriate follow-up medical care."
Lawyers for the porn industry's clinic, the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, which performed the HIV test on Burts, insisted any claim he was not properly treated is "not truthful and ... self-serving." But the California Department of Public Health just denied its application to operate. Once again, the porn industry looks shady.
Burts says the clinic told him he contracted the HIV virus at a gay porn shoot in Florida, but the clinic told the press that he must have become infected in his personal life. Translation: Whom are you going to trust -- a porn star or the porn industry? This evolving story comes six years after up to 14 porn actors tested HIV-positive, forcing several porn companies to close.
Porn moguls obviously want the "talent" to feel safe, but they don't want to film scenes with condoms -- for monetary reasons. The pornographers at Vivid Entertainment said when they became a mandatory-condom company for nearly seven years, they saw their sales drop nearly 20 percent.
Pornography isn't just unhealthy for our culture; it's unhealthy for the "talent" that star in these films, with the endless carousel of sex partners. It should be only a matter of time before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or their California equivalent) starts investigating -- unless, of course, government officials are too afraid of appearing like squelchers of a Howard Stern version of "freedom of speech."
It's ironic that our news media are such evangelists for "safe sex" with condoms, and very critical of anyone who's anti-condom as a menace to society, but they haven't forced that latex gospel on the porn industry, despite the obvious threat of fatal sexually transmitted diseases between strangers on the set.
Then there's the gay-porn industry -- which as a rule requires condoms in films, but doesn't even HIV-test their stars. Without much irony, Jay Barmann of the San Francisco blog SFist reported, "The HIV status of gay porn performers is a particular taboo subject, with a kind of don't-ask-don't-tell attitude proliferating in the industry, which mostly tries to keep performers safe by requiring condom use and which fears bad publicity from performers revealing their statuses."
In response to this environment, the porn company Treasure Island Media recently took the shocking step of promoting a gay couple with one HIV-negative and one HIV-positive partner having "unprotected" sex as "role models." Paul Morris, the company's owner, spoke of demolishing "the HIV-positive closet" and pledged, "We will not allow reactionary individuals and organizations to dictate our behavior." HIV and AIDS are "more or less manageable," he said. "The real battle is against prejudice, ignorance and unfounded and useless fear."
Barmann, no anti-porn "prude," was shocked for the public health and for the rights of actors. "Say what he will about battling prejudice and fear, Morris stands to benefit financially from the unprotected sex his performers agree to have, and he is nonetheless an employer who knowingly puts his workers in harm's way."
Our media just found it wildly controversial that the Pope might hypothetically suggest a male prostitute using a condom may be trying to show a health concern for others. But somehow, there is no controversy or debate when secular sexual progressives fail to crusade against pornographers on something so contrary to their own condom-promoting "safe sex" philosophy. The old AIDS slogan was "Silence equals death." Who will speak out before the next greedy Derrick Burts gets infected?
Just how stupid are the Derricks of this world to get involved in death-trap industries like this?
Hey buddy, the last place on earth I want to be is in your bedroom.
You want to immerse your mind in pornography? Get a video camera and play with it.
How much demand was there for porn when it was illegal?
Not so much. Demands are created.
Ah, the “Taliban” argument!
So original.
No one wants to be in your bedroom, idiot.
There could be something to that too. Then the creation of a vicious cycle.
AGAIN, eveybody that uses meth gets addicted, steals, robs, and does whatever to get meth until they kill themselves.
Why do I find that difficult to believe...
Because you think your morality is superior to mine.
And this is the most evil and soulless statement I ever heard.
Victims are just collateral damage in your book? Sucks to be them, eh? Just as long as you get to indulge in your selfish fantasies, who cares what happens to others. Gotcha.
If the government gets to decide what is moral and what people do with their own bodies- you will be in trouble when the people in charge finally have different morals than you.
That's exactly what's going on right now in our country and that's why we're in such a mess.
Every law on the books is someone's morals. Laws against murder, rape, theft, vandalism, etc are all laws based on the Judeo-Christian belief system which is the only one that will produce a free and safe society.
It's not a matter of imposing someone's morals on everyone, but whose morals. Ones that will either provide a safe and free society, one that values human life or one which devalues it and preys on the lusts of others at the expense of human life.
Porn is a cancer eating at the moral fabric of our society. It is a common denominator for serial killers. No victims, eh? Or is that the price we pay for you to feed your lust? Tell that to the girl who gets raped and killed and her family who has to live with it.
And the people pressured into producing porn. So they get dissease and waste away in a horrible death. Collateral damage just so you can indulge your lust, eh? The price we pay for a being *free*? Too bad for them as long as you get your jollies.
Porn cheapens sex, abases women, and devalues life, and your first comment there about victims being the price we pay for *being free* shows just how effective that is in its end result.
dockkiller
Since Feb 12, 2010
Beautiful Prose. Sounds like:
Total government control= Real Freedom
If I’m in charge, we protect the borders, build the military and pave the roads. You can’t legislate what adults do with their own bodies.
The taliban argument isn’t BS. Ever read the Scarlet Letter? People are always telling other people what to do. All these fat people better watch out when the government tells them what to eat because they are having an adverse affect on health care with diabetes, etc.
And I don’t want a porn stage hour brothel in the public square. I also don’t want you telling me I’m a scumbag and should be jailed because I read playboy in my own home.
Jack-booted thuggery is already here. Let’s not give them another reason to arrest us.
And nobody is forcing anyone to look at porn.
When a society is lured into believing it is wrong to establish taboos which bolster the society’s functioning by defining its identity, that society is dying. The liberaltarians want the American society to give way to the libertine mindset, characterized by unincumbered self-indulgence, which in the end is the antithesis of a fear of the Lord. And we know what ‘a fear of the Lord is’ ... liberaltarians don’t want a wise society, they want freedom to pursue complete self-indulgence, imagining the society they sprout from will remain in tact as they indulge their sick souls, stupidly.
Lurking since 05.
Does that make my opinion worth less?
Please define porn.
Keep it simple:
Victoria’s secret?
Playboy?
Hustler?
Hotel room video?
Or something worse?
You can’t legislate what people do with their own bodies.
My, my, what a genius you are.
How old are you?
People rape with their own bodies.
People steal with their own bodies.
People commit arson with their own bodies - and sometimes on their own private property, too - there was a case here like that a few years ago! Burned only his own proprety, still was a crime and got arrested.
People commit crimes using their own bodies.
What you do with your own body - get this, read it slowly - maybe twice - often affects other people! We live in a society, what we do affects others.
No one is saying you can’t practice weird sex practices and film them and watch them with your good buddies.
That is private.
The porn industry is very public and has nothing to do with your body or your bedroom. You want porn? Make your own. What YOU want is a huge porn industry to feed your own desire for it. That is sickening. Victims? No problem, doesn’t bother you.
When that affect is noxious and harmful and destructive, it is sometimes wrong and sometimes illegal (not always the same).
You never addressed my extremely important comment that pornography was - now read this one slowly, too - NOT considered protected by the First Amendment (that’s the free speech etc one) by the writers or signers of the Constitution, nor by Constitutional lawyers, judges or scholars - for around 200 years!
Leftists, commies and perverts decided FOR us that porn is now protected under the Constitution - just around the same time they also decided that abortion is legal under the Constitution! Well, how about that!
Both immoral, both wrong, and two wrong decisions by SCOTUS.
Your feeble and shallow straw man arguments fool no one, and only convince your fellow porn affociando soul-dead libertines.
They are ultimately anihilantionists, as their sick childish utopian fantasy would, if implemented, lead to chaos, barbarism, then jackbooted thuggery they can’t even imagine.
I’m not going to define pornography. There are legal definitions, find ‘em.
I wonder what your previous screen name was, if you had one. I think maybe you did.
Demand means someone will supply. If there is a multi billion dollar demand for teen girls & boys engaging in all sorts of porn then the demand will be met just like it is with crack.
Like crack suppliers the people who supply porn are lower then worms and will kill anyone who tries to stifle their flow of cash.
I agree no-one can or should be allowed in your palace but if you are doing something that intentionally harms others then you lose the right to that privacy.
Demand is also created. Meth didn’t exist at some point in the past, now it does. There was no demand when there was no meth.
Porn might have had a very small number of people who wanted it when it was illegal.
Now the demand has increased, due to easy availability. And countless lives and families wrecked because of it.
I agree that porn producers are lower than worms.
There is a demand for child porn and child prostitutes - every now and then producers, users and purveyors of same get arrested. Just because there is a demand for something doesn’t justify its production, sale or use.
If you are ever running things we’ll all be in re-education camps.
Let me reiterate-
Adults watching adults.
Not child porn, not murder, or arson, or rape- those all deprive others to their natural rights.
I’m only talking about the legal stuff.
No former screen name.
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