Let’s have an honest talk about monkeypox on campus

Colleges and universities are beginning their new academic years this month. For the past two-and-a-half years, educational institutions have navigated the coronavirus pandemic and its effects. While most experts agree that COVID-19 has transitioned to a far more manageable endemic, the specter of monkeypox now looms as faculty and students return to campus. Unfortunately, the progressive assumptions that pervade higher education interfere with a straightforward conversation about monkeypox.

In recent days the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education have published several articles that aim to help academic leaders prepare their institutions for monkeypox. These articles offer plenty of helpful information about the nature of monkeypox and sound advice about planning for potential outbreaks. They even rightly note that monkeypox has thus far primarily affected the LGBTQ+ population, especially gay men.

Unfortunately, these articles quickly pivot to warning about the need not to “stigmatize” the LGBTQ+ community because of monkeypox. Some of their examples Christians can and should affirm without reservation. We should avoid spreading false information that monkeypox is classified as an sexually transmitted disease [STD] or that it affects gay men exclusively (even if, as reported, more than 95 percent of cases are found in that population).

And yet, there is a hesitancy for these articles to state the obvious. The sexual promiscuity that characterizes so much of the homosexual community explains why monkeypox has disproportionately affected that community. The likelihood that the virus will spread to other populations, especially in a college or university, strongly correlates to the rampant sexual culture that pervades many campuses. Monkeypox isn’t technically an STD, but it essentially functions like an STD. And it will continue to do so, even as it spreads via other forms of close contact.

The hesitancy of these higher education periodicals to talk straight about the relationship between homosexual sex and monkeypox mirrors the situation in the mainstream media. Comparison is frequently made to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, which the media notes was falsely labeled a gay disease. They warn that we must not do the same today, resisting those voices—almost all of them socially conservative, of course—that insist on discussing the dangers of homosexual sex in particular or sexual promiscuity more generally.

While HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is classified as an STD and monkeypox is not, the AIDS analogy is more apt than media progressives realize. It is true that AIDS is not a virus limited to gay men. However, the virus became the center of a national health crisis because of a cluster of morally reckless actions, especially sexual promiscuity (first homosexual, then later heterosexual) and the sharing of intravenous needles by drug users. Yes, individuals contracted HIV through other means, most notably blood transfusions. But this is because infected individuals had given blood. And those source individuals almost certainly contracted HIV through sexual promiscuity or sharing “dirty” needles.

Sin always has consequences. And while those consequences are always individual, they are really far more than individual. Our sinful choices almost always affect those around us. And when systems enable or even support sinful activities, they create a context where those who have not engaged in sinful actions themselves are nevertheless threatened by the effects of the disordered choices others have made. Unfortunately, too many universities are systems that support and even celebrate sexual promiscuity of nearly every type so long as would-be sexual partners consent.

There is very little likelihood you will contract monkeypox if you refrain from having sex outside of marriage. If you practice sexual restraint and still contract the virus, it will almost certainly be because of unwise choices made by others.

To be clear, the above message isn’t distinctively Christian. I don’t expect secular institutions to make distinctively Christian arguments related to monkeypox or anything else. But it is a common-sense message rooted in the natural law and reinforced by biblical understandings of sex, marriage, sin, and virtue. It might also prove to be an apologetic in a decadent age where expressive individualism is the air we breathe, sex is an idol to which too many in our culture bow the knee, and facts are too often casualties of identity politics. Sadly, those disorders will be harder to eradicate than monkeypox.