In 1983, when the AIDS epidemic first broke onto the national scene, this writer wrote in a column predicting scores of thousands could perish: "The poor homosexuals. They have declared war against nature, and nature is exacting an awful retribution."

 This sentence restated the Natural Law teaching of Thomas Aquinas. Homosexuality is against nature, (SET ITAL) contra naturam. (END ITAL) It also said what was, by then, obvious to all. Acts that cannot be described in this publication were transmitting a dread and deadly disease that was killing homosexuals in the hundreds, and would soon kill them in the scores of thousands.

 Indeed, a subsequent clamor by homosexuals for a mass government education program on the use of condoms suggested they knew exactly how and why the disease was spreading.

 But in a May 28 column, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times accused this writer, Ronald Reagan and the Rev. Jerry Falwell of "behaving more immorally" in the 1980s than the clientele of "the San Francisco bathhouses." It was our "indifference to the suffering of gays," said Kristof, that "allowed the epidemic to spread."

 Not a word of reproof -- or even of recognition -- may be found in Kristof's column against those who actually spread the disease that has now killed millions. Nick knows his readers.

 What does all of this tell us? Our society is being marinated in lies -- the lie that homosexuality is a natural, normal and healthy lifestyle; the lie that those who think otherwise are all hateful bigots; the lie that the diseases that afflict the homosexual community are the fault of an uncaring society.

 Humankind cannot stand too much truth, said T.S. Eliot.

 In the matter of Robert Smith, there was indeed intolerance: a savage intolerance of one man with the courage to declare Christian truths in the face of the fabricated and fake faith that has become the established religion of America's secular elite.