The people who called AIDS God’s punishment for gays are helping measles make a comeback

MAGA, MAHA, or whatever we're calling a cult of people determined to drag America back to 1830, is having another banner year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last Friday that the U.S. currently has the largest number of measles cases we’ve seen in 35 years, and it comes amid a dramatic slide in childhood vaccination rates. Maybe it’s time to bring back the covered wagons and live in simpler times when 40 percent of all children failed to reach adulthood. We’re well on our way.

Growing up in the '80s and '90s, it was impossible to escape the hatred and hostility hurled at the gay community. AIDS was our fault. It was God’s punishment, and we were simply being killed off by some divine and righteous act brought in by millions of prayer warriors hellbent on never minding their own business. Outside of living in constant fear of HIV itself, kids like me were constantly hearing the same thing from basically everyone. Ship gay people to an island and let them all die together. How Christian of them. My personal favorite saying from the time was, “AIDS kills fags dead." I got so tired of wiping that off my locker in junior high that I eventually just let it stay.

Fast forward to 2020. During COVID, those same political and religious movements rejected vaccines, masks, and basic public health because “Don’t Tread On Me,” or some other dumb tagline co-opted from another time with no historical context. Whatever works, I guess. And now in 2026, as our summer of preventable diarrhea and other vintage diseases spread across our great land like wildfire plumes, let’s take a closer look at where these measles outbreaks are occurring.

In a map published by NBC, the largest circle sits over West Texas, where the current epidemic exploded through a close-knit Mennonite community with low vaccination rates. Another large cluster appears over South Carolina. Another over Utah. Another area around parts of Virginia. Smaller outbreaks dot Idaho, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oklahoma, Florida, and dozens of other states.

These aren't simply places where measles magically happened to appear. They're places where vaccination rates have fallen below the threshold needed for community immunity, often because public health has been replaced by influencer scams, fearmongering, ideology, conspiracy theories, religious objections, and decades of organized attacks on public health itself. There are different backgrounds and denominations but always the same result: communities increasingly disconnected from modern medicine become fertile ground for a virus that was declared eliminated in the United States a quarter century ago.

Maybe these communities would do themselves a huge favor and pay attention to how quickly and smartly the LGBTQ+ community now handles a health crisis. During mpox, LGBTQ+ organizations mobilized almost immediately, sharing information, organizing vaccine clinics, and contacting partners to reduce transmission without waiting for government intervention. We’ve been through this before and know a thing or two about navigating a public health emergency when the whole world seems to want you eradicated. Regarding measles in 2026, it would be easy for me and many others to simply say, “they brought this on themselves”, but that’s difficult when kids are involved.

One of those children could be another Megan Phelps-Roper. She spent her childhood inside the Westboro Baptist Church carrying signs declaring that AIDS was God's punishment for people like me because that's what the adults she trusted taught her to believe. Years later, she left. She walked away from her church, most of her family, and the only world she'd ever known because she discovered that she had been sold a lie and was forced to perpetuate that lie in a very sadistic, public way. Every one of those orange circles on the CDC's map contains children who have no control over the adults making life-and-death decisions for them. Some will spend the rest of their lives in those communities. Some will reject their families and never look back.

The same political and religious movement that spent my childhood insisting gay people were America's public enemy #1 has spent the last decade spreading snake oil treatments and bullying Americans into harming their children, distrusting vaccines, ridiculing scientists, and treating expertise as elitism. And now, having succeeded in convincing millions of people that public health itself is the enemy, they aren't stopping at our borders.

The federal government is slashing HIV prevention programs, dismantling America's global HIV/AIDS response, attacking scientific institutions, and abandoning the very partnerships that have saved millions of lives around the world. The consequences won't be measured only in this year's measles cases or next year's HIV infections. They'll be measured in children who never reach adulthood, families who lose loved ones to preventable diseases, and communities forced to relive tragedies we already knew how to prevent.

Viruses, of course, couldn't care less.

Viruses have no interest in our culture wars. They don't care about race, religion, politics, gender, or sexual orientation. They care about opportunity. They care about finding susceptible hosts, reproducing, and spreading as efficiently as possible. We have spent the last decade making their job infinitely easier.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness

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