Five years ago, The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly did a front-page smear of Christian AIDS activist Jerry Thacker, who had been appointed to the presidential AIDS commission. The headline? "AIDS Panel Choice Wrote of a ‘Gay Plague.'"

Thacker, who is HIV-positive himself, had merely written on his Website that health authorities and journalists had used the term "gay plague" during the early 1980s. Amid a media firestorm, he withdrew his nomination the next day.

Fast forward to Connolly's lede in the August 7, A-2 story "Early Lessons Forgotten, AIDS Conference Told," on the International AIDS Conference's finding that HIV/AIDS is skyrocketing largely because of homosexual sex. Connolly describes AIDS in a similar way to how Thacker put it: