apparentlyeverything:

brehaaorgana:

picsthatmakeyougohmm:

hmmm

Correlation does not equal causation and this is very serophobic. also if you somehow think making an STI a FELONY is the way to prevent spreading STIs then why aren’t you mad that spreading herpes isn’t a felony? y’all need to consider WHY a disease being spread is a felony, and how easy it can be to say someone “knowingly” did something when they didn’t. 

Pairing these two stories that have nothing to do with each other is both willfully ignorant and serophobic. The first is about SB 239 which finally reduced intentional HIV transmission to a misdemeanor in California, making it similar to other “serious infectious diseases.” Intentionally transmitting or exposing people to other STDs still carries no criminal penalty at all. The fact that HIV was ever singled out this way was a product of extreme homophobia and serophobia in the 1980s (which, as we can see, is still going strong!), but virtually all research since then has shown that these laws only fuel stigma and serve as an incentive not to be tested for HIV (you can’t be charged if you don’t know your status), and as a result, serve to increase transmission rates. They also disproportionately affect vulnerable people (trans women and WOC in particular) X  HIV criminalization laws also don’t reflect progress in treatment of the virus, as even people on viral suppressing medications who are undetectable and incapable of transmitting the virus can be charged. 

Why? Because in California (until SB 239), as in most other states, these laws don’t even require proof that HIV transmission has occurred, only that the individual knowingly “exposed” their partner to the virus.  “According to a Williams Institute study, in California 800 people were charged under HIV criminalization laws between 1988 and 2014. In 98 percent of those cases, the prosecution wasn’t required to prove the defendant had intended to transmit HIV to another person. None of the cases — that’s right, zero — required that transmission of HIV had occurred before the defendant was charged. The 2015 Williams Institute study also found that 67 percent of those who were arrested under these laws were people of color, 95 percent of the cases involved sex workers, and — perhaps most disturbingly — “every incident in which charges were brought resulted in a conviction.” X Unfortunately the biggest shortcoming of California’s new law is that it retains felony status for exposure for sex workers, and it’s still illegal to engage in sex work after receiving a positive diagnosis.

As for the other article, maybe if OP had read it instead of jumping at a chance to be serophobic, they’d see that it’s talking mostly about rates of syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea, not HIV, that it seems to be related to systemic racism, and that it’s an increase that’s been happening over the last five years.