Apologizes after uproar; William F. Buckley suggested it four years agoA legislator in the African nation of Swaziland has called for all those infected with the HIV virus to be branded on the buttocks.
"I have a solution to this virus. The solution will come from a law that will make it compulsory to test for HIV. Once you test positive, you should be branded on the buttocks," quipped parliamentarian Timothy Myeni.
It gets better."Before having sex with anyone, people will then check the buttocks of their partners before proceeding with their mission," Myeni added. Adds AFP:
Landlocked Swaziland is one of the world's poorest nations with the highest HIV prevalence in the world under the rule of Africa's last absolute monarch King Mswati III.
Miyeni, who leads a popular gospel group, has stuck to his call for compulsory HIV testing but apologized for the buttocks branding suggestion.
"I am very sorry for saying HIV positive people should be branded, I did not know it would turn out like this. I have seen that the suggestion was very offensive and many think I was discriminating, so I withdraw my statement," he said last week.
Reader responses will be published in the Times of Swaziland next Tuesday, the newspaper said in its online edition.
As our readers point out, Myeni is far from the first politician or pundit to suggest such a thing.
In 2005 while toiling as a National Review editor-at-large, the noted conservative author William F. Buckley, who passed away a little over a year ago, wrote that "[s]omeone, 20 years ago, suggested a discreet tattoo the site of which would alert the prospective partner to the danger of proceeding as had been planned."
"But the author of the idea was treated as though he had been schooled in Buchenwald," Buckley continued, "and the idea was not widely considered, but maybe it is up now for reconsideration."
