Ghulam Nabi Azad

While the rest of us have been wondering whether or not people are born gay, India’s Health Minister has know all along: that it is in fact a disease from the West. The only thing he is still struggling with is identifying sufferers from this illness as it is “difficult to find them because you don’t know who is doing it and where they are.”

Speaking at a national HIV/Aids conference on Monday, the minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, said that gay sex was “unnatural and not good for India”:

Unfortunately this disease has come to the world and in our country in which a man has sex with a man. It is very unnatural and this should not happen, but in our country the numbers are increasing. It’s difficult to find them because you don’t know who is doing it and where they are.”

My favourite part, however, is his statement in response to the outrage:

“I am sorry if I have hurt feelings of any section of the society. During my speech I used technical words. I kept myself very clear, didn’t use the word homosexual or gay. The subject was HIV, and I used man having sex with man in Hindi for contracting HIV. It was interpreted as man having sex with man as a disease. I didn’t use the word gay at all!”

So he didn’t use the word “gay”, he just referred to men having sex with other men?

National Conference president Omar Abdullah (right) and Ghulam Nabi Azad, in New Delhi on Tuesday.

[Source: Times Live]