Do you have HIV/AIDS. Does celibacy or condom use really keep you from the sexual fulfillment that was rightfully yours but you were deterred by the thought of a long prison term? Well, fear no more. California says if you want to give someone else a chronic and possibly fatal disease without telling them, knock yourself out.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill Friday that lowers from a felony to a misdemeanor the crime of knowingly exposing a sexual partner to HIV without disclosing the infection. The measure also applies to those who give blood without telling the blood bank that they are HIV-positive. Modern medicine allows those with HIV to live longer lives and nearly eliminates the possibility of transmission, according to state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Assemblyman Todd Gloria (D-San Diego), authors of the bill. “Today California took a major step toward treating HIV as a public health issue, instead of treating people living with HIV as criminals,” Wiener said in a statement. “HIV should be treated like all other serious infectious diseases, and that’s what SB 239 does.”

Who else could say this with as much authority as a San Francisco Democrat named Wiener?

Let’s be clear on this. Recklessly giving someone else a venereal disease is against the law in virtually the entire nation. This include syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia, as well as HIV. California criminalizes refusal to take tuberculosis medicine.

The management of HIV/AIDS has long been an outlier in how public health authorities deal with infectious diseases. Because the main carriers of HIV are a protected class in the view of the secular left, that is, sexually promiscuous homosexual men, there has been a fight, from the beginning to not treat HIV as something special. Historically, outbreaks of STDs and other infectious diseases have been managed by contact tracing, testing, and, if necessary, court ordered treatment. HIV was a case where people tried to convince us that this was an epidemic (epidemics, by definition, have to be easy to spread) when, in fact, the disease was spread mainly through high risk behavior, that is, unprotected anal sex and intravenous drug use, and, at the same time, refused to use tried and true methods of controlling an infectious disease. This kind of gutlessness caused a lot of death and injury and the new California law will cause even more.

It is really difficult to see how allowing the transmission of HIV/AIDS is a victory for public health. For that matter, I don’t see how encouraging people who know they have a potentially fatal infectious disease to expose other without their consent is something to boast about But, then again, this is California and I don’t live there. If you do, the late comedian Bob Hope had some great advice:

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”

CORRECTION. In the original post I erroneously said that California had made giving HIV/AIDS legal, actually, they have made it a misdemeanor, sort of like a spitting on the sidewalk or jaywalking. I’ve changed the headline to correct my error.