Former minister is HIV positive

Hold up! Before you read on, please read this...
This post was published more than 14 years ago
I keep old posts on the site because I often enjoy reading old content on other people's sites. It can be interesting to see how views have changed over time: for example, how my strident teenage views have, to put it mildly, mellowed.
I'm not a believer in brushing the past under the carpet. I've written some offensive rubbish on here in the past: deleting it and pretending it never happened doesn't change that. I hope that stumbling across something that's 14 years old won't offend anyone anew, because I hope that people can understand that what I thought and felt and wrote about then is probably very different to what I think and feel and wrote about now. It's a relic of an (albeit recent) bygone era.
So, given the age of this post, please bear in mind:
- My views may well have changed in the last 14 years. I have written some very silly things over the years, many of which I find utterly cringeworthy today.
- This post might use words or language in ways which I would now consider highly inappropriate, offensive, embarrassing, or all three.
- Factual information might be outdated.
- Links might be broken, and embedded material might not appear properly.
Okay. Consider yourself duly warned. Read on...
This article from BBC News says that
The former Labour culture secretary, Chris Smith, has revealed he has been HIV positive for 17 years.
This shouldn’t be big news. The more that HIV is treated like some terrible disease that has to be ‘announced’, the greater the stigma that will be attached to it. Chris Smith was right to make it public that he has HIV (he makes a very convincing argument for doing so in today’s Sunday Times), but the media are wrong to make such a big fuss about it.
This 280th post was filed under: News and Comment, Politics.