For all of those that think they don't need to wash after using the bathroom, before eating, when you have any type of open sore and you are touching things and people, wash your damn hands, take a damn shower after a sweaty activity!

As long as there are sports arenas there will be battlefields.

When Dan Savage says "I would rather DIE than eat pussy. Seriously." No once calls him a gynophobe or misogynist.

But if a straight man says sex between two men is gross, he gets labeled homophobic.

I've been in the gay area for 57 years, hung out in all the clubs in the 70's ... what i know about what gay men actually DO away from the constraints of society, and, of course, the civilizing influence of women ... well ... let me just say it's pretty gross.

So we have a gay apologist here pointing out that professional football players get this staph infection as well as barebacking, wildly promiscuous gay men. The point being? It's like the wingnuts screaming "B-b-b-but Clinton did xxxxx ..." every time one of their toilet-traders gets busted.

Lastly:

It is fair to reason that more American men play football than have sex with one another.

What?

It is time to quit enabling minorities, and demand some responsibility from all of them.

And before any of you call me a Republican, I have been labeled and "ultra-leftwing" dem my whole life. But enough is enough.

I am more interested in truth than dogma at this point.

When Dan Savage says "I would rather DIE than eat pussy. Seriously." No once calls him a gynophobe or misogynist.

Wanna bet?

He is obviously both.. And probably doesn't get much (if any) pussy either.

Savage wouldn't have a clue how to pleasure a woman, all you have to do is listen to his self obsessed bloviating for ten minutes to figure that out.

Spoken as a cunning linguist who gets all the pussy he wants.

Well, it constantly amazes me that in the ignorant public's collective mind, homosexuality = gay men. Clearly, this is a male problem, and has nothing to do with homosexuality per se. You don't see any discussion of lesbians getting this infection more than other people.

The issue here is that men are typically not as cleanly (or whatever) as women, therefore they are more likely to catch or transmit this infection. It's simple probability, and nothing to do with morality, that males in frequent contact with other males (whether because they are macking or because they are sharing locker rooms, saunas and whirlpools) are increasing their odds of transmitting and catching.

You'd have to perform some pretty crazy logical contortionism to come to a conclusion other than that.

I find the idea that more men play football than have sex with men highly dubious. There's a lot of crossover, too.

I know straight women who would rather die than give a blowjob. And straight men who would agree with Dan Savage. That has nothing to do with hating the other gender, it's merely a distaste for a particular act. What's next, saying every woman who'd rather die than have anal sex is a homophobe?

The grass is green, but not everything green is grass, y'know?

My comment was aimed at Aycharaych and Anon 12:16.

Carry on.

Geeze! Can we climb off our soap boxes and stick to the point of the actual article. The point is, when the original study expressing concern over the danger of football players being infected with this new and more dangerous form of Methycillin resistant staff was published, it got zero airplay, even here in Minnesota where they canceled two weeks of the high school wrestling season last year because of an outbreak of herpes-based skin rashes that had clearly been spread across several teams during wrestling meets.

But when the same Methycillin resistant staff strain was documented to ALSO be occurring among gay populations on the coasts, suddenly it's BIG NEWS and cause for the homophobes to come out of the woodwork demanding that gay people all go back to their closets at the least or locked up at the most.

Now... in responding to a previous post. If you see a mouse in your kitchen and you calmly set up mouse traps and/or set out mouse poison to kill or capture the mouse, you're having a normal reaction. If you scream and jump onto a chair, table, or countertop, you're expressing a phobia.

In the same manner, if the idea of two men expressing affection for each other, including sexual contact leaves you thinking, no thanks, I'll take a woman any time, you're having a normal reaction. If it creeps you out or freaks you out, you're having a phobic reaction.

Normal reactions are... well... normal reactions. Phobic reactions are generally learned from friends, family members, religion and the culture around us and can also be unlearned. Just because everyone else you know has the same phobic reaction you do, doesn't mean it's not expressing a phobia.

It's about time someone pointed out that it's casual contact between MEN, not gay men in particular, that is spreading Staph.

A straight friend sent me an article about the new staph spreading among gay men. The article only mentioned gay sex as a means of transmission. My straight friend didn't understand why I saw an article about a new "gay plague" as biased.

It's not sex spreading the disease, it's a lot of other factors that latex won't fix. That makes the disease a lot more frightening. There's no possible way to limit it to the gay community.

Thanks for bringing a little balance to the discussion. Finding Sex Act X unappealing is not in itself a sign of anything much. I understand some people don't eat blueberries. Most do. Some people eat brains. Most don't.

Now if somebody starts using terms like "gross" and "disgusting" to describe somebody else's taste in sex acts (or food), they are at a minimum being (1) narrow minded, and (2) rude. And both of those can be indicators of prejudice, or at least a predisposition to prejudice. Here's one litmus test: If you describe two guys kissing as "gross," but wouldn't use that term to describe a guy kissing a girl (or two girls kissing), you're probably into the prejudice ballpark.

On another point, I join others in thinking it very unlikely that "more American men play football than have sex with one another." Indeed the opposite must be true by something like an order of 10. I'm sure that in my high school (ca. 1970), there were more football players than guys having sex with each other. (I wasn't doing either, but I know how many were playing football and have a pretty good idea how many might have been fiddling about with members not their own.) But that proportion did not extend outside of that institution. I suppose counting intramural flag or touch football, the footballers at my college might have outnumbered, though not dramatically, the boys who boffed boys. Post-university, there's no way. I haven't known a contemporary of mine who was still playing football, of any kind, since I was maybe 25. Maybe if you count all the males who have ever played football, or ever touched one -- but then you'd have to count all the males who had ever experimented with another male (or been experimented upon).

Anyway it's just a strange surmise. Could there be a typo there somewhere?