The US Is Facing an 'Out of Control' STI Epidemic, Experts Warn

If you read these three articles it really starts to paint the picture of what we are really dealing with from a medical/historical standpoint:

The history of Syphilis Part One: cause and symptoms | Science Museum

The history of syphilis part two: Treatments, cures and legislation | Science Museum

Why Extreme Syphilis Symptoms Are Showing Up Now

We feared COVID, which had flu-like symptoms, and then was lethal for a very small portion of the population. Syphilis may not be an equal lethal threat, compared to COVID, but the symptoms inflicted by the disease are terrifying in comparison.

 

Defending a moral or ethical opinion was not the purpose of my last post you just responded to. I have stated my opinion in post #53 and #61. You don't have to agree with it. I don't expect you to necessarily agree with it. That is fine. We can agree to disagree. The goal of my last post was actually more to move the thread forward in a different direction where maybe we can lay the moral and ethical debates over sexuality aside and just look at this from a medical/historical vantage point. I am willing to let the thread go that direction if you are willing to let the thread go that direction.

If you read the 3 articles they are very educational to understand that syphilis was a deeply feared disease before penicillin was introduced as a treatment in 1945. It is a disease to be more feared than COVID is IMO. People contracted COVID, and for the most part they recovered from it with the same quality of life they had before contracting it. Syphilis was not like that. It was a bane to people's existence who contracted it. It was a truly feared disease for a few centuries. It helps to understand that penicillin kept the problem of syphilis in check through the 2nd half of the 20th century, which is why many licensed doctors have very little medical training to deal with a disease that was not a problem for half of a century. And then the historical understanding of syphilis as a disease and how we've related to it at different periods of human history helps us to understand what we are looking at if this disease comes back in a serious way. The 3rd article explores some of the more serious syphilis cases that have emerged in recent years.

That was the point of my post. You don't have to agree with my synthesis earlier in the thread to find reading the articles is educational and helpful to understanding this topic. In fact, the articles buttress a point you would probably want to emphasize anyways: syphilis originally was an affliction on a world that unquestionably rejected homosexuality. So, reading about syphilis from 1400-1950 in societies that overwhelmingly rejected gay marriage really adds no value to my previous argument. If my goal was to drive home the point that homosexuals are primarily at fault, I would have found and posted different articles related to this subject. So your desire to shift the discussion to heterosexuals as the source of the problem is in no way opposed by the authors of these articles. The articles I linked to do not come from conservative sources.