A hell of a way to wake up

We got up this morning at about 11:30 am, but we're still in bed, surfing the web side-by-side from our laptops.

In the process, I've learned that:

• Just because I stopped reading Salon for a while doesn't mean that the Republican Congress stopped getting up to its usual self-righteous shenanigans. Their current cause celebré: Terry Schiavo
  (subscription required).
• The government's senior minister of state for health isn't done scapegoating gay people for the spread of HIV. With the glad assistance of the local media, he would like to now make it a criminal offence for an HIV-positive person to have unprotected sex, or intend to have unprotected sex --- even if the person did not know that he himself/she herself was HIV-positive. (Speech here; pay special attention to the last paragraph.) Never mind the complications of seroconversion. Are we going to make mothers criminals too if they pass on a disease to the babies in their wombs, even though they didn't know they had the disease in the first place? Oh wait, I'd better not sneeze on anyone because who knows, maybe I have the flu and I'll pass it on to someone and he could die from it (in the US, about 36,000 people die from the flu and its complications every year) and then they'll throw me in jail.
• By the way, the minister says in the same speech: "Unless we change the law, we cannot change attitudes." So much for promoting a sense of ownership and responsibility about the society we live in. I feel so empowered, knowing that if I were about to get married, maybe, just maybe, for my own good, my government would force my spouse and I to take an Aids test.

As Adri writes,

"It makes me angry that my country is so violently opposed to how I live my life. Even if I am a student just like you, if I live and love just like you, if I love my family just like you, go to church and worship just like you, am as susceptible to pain and heartbreak as you are, sit for the same exams like you do, ask for a phone number and have dinner dates like you do (not jump into bed straight from a club) - we even bleed like everyone does. The people I have elected to love negates all that, and I am automagically transformed into the antithesis of family and values and all things good."

I'm not gay, but I hold many opinions that diverge from the mainstream views of the society where I live. I just can't wait to be criminalised for the lot of them.

I must not be a frog in the well. I must get out.