When the AIDS epidemic started more than two decades ago, 90% of the infections were white homosexuals living in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, IV drug users in these same locations and a tiny group of hemophiliacs. This was true for the first five years of the epidemic. At that point, standard public health practices such as quarantine and closing places that were known to aid in the spread the disease, such as public bath houses, would have effectively curtailed the spread of the disease. But proven public health practices were vetoed because gay activists feared that such methods would further stigmatized their “life-style” and erode the gains they had made in its public acceptance.

So instead of effective public health methods, gay activists pressed for an educational campaign that proved to be costly and largely ineffective, in part because these same activists demanded that it be generalized to speak to the population as a whole rather than warning the people most at risk: white homosexual men. So, now more than 20 years later, more than 500,000 people have died from AIDS in the US alone and we still don’t track individual cases, require testing of at-risk communities, or trace the contact these individuals might have had with others. For more than two decades, the fight with AIDS has been managed by political activists on the left instead of science. And those decisions are not being made based on what will give the best life to the most individuals, but rather on the basis of a group agenda that would sacrifice the lives of millions of people upon the alter of “gay rights.”

Some might say “That’s ridiculous! How can you say that gay activists don’t care about gays?” But that’s really the very point. The liberal agenda, not just for gay rights, but more generally, is almost always about what advances the cause of some hypothetical future Utopia based on dubious social and economic theory. It is most assuredly not about helping individuals.

Consider, as another example, America’s inner cities. Liberals and their agendas have been managing the largest cities in America for more than eight decades. Every decade more liberal than the last and what is the outcome? Poverty, despair, and broken families. Why? Because the liberal agenda believes that to change people you have to change their environment instead of the other way around. Mind you, I’m not speaking of the thousands of charitable souls who, regardless of political philosophy, help in soup kitchens, shelters, drug rehab centers and so on. I’m speaking of the liberal agenda that believes in large, group solutions to every social ill. The supposed answer to inner city blight was welfare and housing projects; group solutions that take away individual freedom and responsibility for “the greater good.”

Of course, this isn’t a coincidence. Watch for this same liberal pattern in almost any area that their reach extends: a propensity for sacrificing individual responsibility, liberties and rights for a promised Utopia based on the group. Of course, this is exactly the same political philosophy that enslaved nearly 1 billion people and killed 100 million innocents over the last century. I’m speaking, of course, of communism—the most deadly and repressive political system to ever exist.

Certainly, my liberal friends would be aghast to be compared to communists, even though many of them believe deep in their hearts that communism was just a good system badly administered. In truth, it was exactly what you get when you believe, as your core political philosophy, that individual rights can always be sacrificed for group Utopia. No amount of death and destruction is too much, as long as we’re on the path to Utopia.

That’s certainly the mental thought process that drives the “gay rights” agenda that sacrifices millions world-wide to avoid stigmatizing a “protected” group. Liberals shame those who don’t agree with them into capitulating. They use phrases like “closed minded,” “bigot,” “uncaring,” “greedy” and so on to describe those who oppose them. Meanwhile, millions of people are forced to pay the price for their version of compassion—not one based on what is going to help people, but one that is based on what will advance the group. That is why my friend is dead and why I’m angry about it.