Pelosi compares the ‘stigma’ of supporting HIV/AIDS victims and transgender people

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) tendency to engage in hyperbolic comparisons to make a point was on full display on Friday while discussing a House bill known as the Equality Act.

While speaking about the legislation at a virtual Human Rights Campaign conference, Pelosi compared the “stigma” of supporting people with HIV/AIDS to supporting transgender individuals, Breitbart reported.

Pelosi on AIDS epidemic

The House Speaker, joined by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), a sponsor of the Equality Act and one of the few openly LGBT members of Congress, was engaged in a discussion with Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David, who remarked on Pelosi’s outspoken support for victims of the HIV/AIDS epidemic when she first entered Congress in the late 1980s.

Pelosi claimed she received pushback for her first speech on the House floor, including from some Democrats, for raising the issue of the deadly disease.

She said she responded to the criticism by asserting that it had been her “purpose” in running for Congress to draw attention to the epidemic, hence the reason for her speech.

“But what it told me was that there were, for some — not those people exactly — but a stigma to all of this [talk about AIDS],” Pelosi said.

She then claimed that the opposition she received convinced her that “we have to get community-based research for prevention and care, we have to fight the discrimination of it all.”

Then vs. now

Pelosi fast-forwarded to the present fight for advancing the LGBTQ cause — particularly the “T” in that acronym and noted a similar level of resistance.

However, she said, “There are so many people on the outside fighting the fight, and in doing so being a model for others to fight their fight.”

Pelosi went on to claim that while some believed the goal of stigma-free equality was “inconceivable,” she and Democrats believed it was “inevitable,” and her purpose now was to erase the gap between those two viewpoints.

Breitbart noted there is one rather substantial issue with Pelosi’s comparison: HIV/AIDS, while treatable and no longer the guaranteed death sentence it once was, is nonetheless a fatal and transmissible disease. Transgenderism, however, also known as gender dysphoria, is not fatal or transmissible and is instead a psychological issue that can be treated with counseling, therapy, or elective surgery.

The post Pelosi compares the ‘stigma’ of supporting HIV/AIDS victims and transgender people first appeared on Conservative Institute.