Greetings and Happy Thanksgiving to all our sinners, saints, and lawyers in between. This week on the Snake Oil Bulletin we decided to take a break from kid bleachers and their ilk to examine some good old fashioned pseudoscientifical gay bashing! Is our first story tangentially related to turkeys and therefore thematically relevant to Thanksgiving enough that we slipped it past the editors? Why yes, yes it is. Let's dive right into some great big homo Turkey woo.

Turkey Promises To Quit Shoving Its Cold Hands Up Your Big Gay Butthole

We did promise our first story would have turkey. We just didn't say it would have so much stuffing.

The nation of Turkey, long known for its mandatory military service, declared last week that it was finally going to end its invasive Gay-Butthole-and-Sex-Tape-Circuit-Party-Jamboree program. Despite being renowned for relatively tolerant views toward homosexuals compared with its Middle Eastern neighbors, the republic was still famous for its nationwide ban on openly gay members in the military, kind of like another ostensibly secular democratic nation that nevertheless operated on the strategically sound notion of "eww homos."

For years, homosexuality was one of the exemptions to the nation's mandatory military service, but the test to prove it was, well, not a good time for all. Young men who wished to take advantage of the clause had to submit to a cruel and invasive examination of their private lives. It wasn't enough to say "Yo, I suck dick." You actually had to prove it. With pics.

As a young Turkish man named Ahmet told the BBC back in 2010, when he informed officials that he was gay, they asked him a series of questions that seemed to fall right out of Bryan Fischer's Craigslist personals ads:

"They asked me when I first had anal intercourse, oral sex, what sort of toys I played with as a child."

Ahmet, a young man in his 20s, told officials he was gay at the first opportunity after he was called up, as he and other conscripts underwent a health check.

"They asked me if I liked football, whether I wore woman's clothes or used woman's perfume," he says.

"I had a few days' beard and I am a masculine guy - they told me I didn't look like a normal gay man."

He was then asked to provide a picture of himself dressed as a woman.

The Turks have clearly never met a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, or they'd know you don't need to shave your beard to rock a shapely frock or two.

Luckily, Ahmet came in at a more tolerant age when claimants of the exemption only had to submit a picture of themselves kissing a man. For poor Gokhan who was conscripted in the '90s, the experience was altogether more humiliating:

''They asked me if I had any photographs.'' Gokhan says, ''And I did.''

He had gone prepared with explicit photographs of himself having sex with another man, having heard that it would be impossible to get out of military service without them.

''The face must be visible,'' says Gokhan. ''And the photos must show you as the passive partner.''

The photographs satisfied the military doctors. Gokhan was handed his pink certificate and exempted from military service.

Outing yourself was not the only way to be kicked out. In many cases, Turkish officers would command doctors to examine men's posteriors to find signs of "psychosexual disorder," which is what the Turkish military still calls homosexuality. Doctors would check the naked recruits' bodies and rectums and ask them about their activities and mannerisms to determine if the young man in question was actually homosexual. In a later interview, Ahmet said that even homosexuals who want to serve have to plead with the doctors not to out them if their buttholes and tests come back positive for Gay.

Now take a wild guess where the Turkish government got the idea that The Gay was a psychosexual disorder? Could it be ... SATAN? No, actually, it was from the United States and the original edition of the DSM, which declared homosexuality a mental disorder based on zero evidence. Pseudoscience never dies; it just shifts location.

After public outcry had finally reached a fever pitch, the Turkish government conceded it would settle for a "public declaration" of homosexuality rather than medical tests (pervert doctors across Asia Minor were no doubt devastated), but as the young men who've used the exemption have attested, the worst part of the policy still remains.

Ahmet and Dokhan both admitted the pink certificate (yes it really is pink) can often lead to serious discrimination in later life. Dokhan reported constant harassment from his coworkers, and Ahmet said that his certificate has made him ineligible for public service and many other job opportunities.

This isn't so much an end to a horrible policy. It just means the Turkish military won't lube up anymore before they screw these young men. Happy Turkey Day indeed.

Person Dumb About Vaccines Pretty Dumb About HIV Too

Remember Jenny McCarthy? Neither does Hollywood, but at one point McCarthy had a middling career on the sidelines of the acting world. All that changed when McCarthy became one of the most outspoken anti-vaccine advocates in Los Angeles, arguing that her son became autistic after his MMR vaccine and later claiming he'd "recovered" from his autism by eating gluten-free fruit and vegetables, because vegetables are fucking magic.

With a stellar record of scientific illiteracy like that, would you believe McCarthy doesn't know how any disease works? Were this a teevee show, this is the point in the program where we would roll out a giant spinning wheel labeled "What Disease Is Jenny Wrong About Today?" with a needle shaped like Jenny's pointed head.

On her Sirius XM radio show (doesn't she know that radio microphones have dangerous chemicals in them? Why is she exposing her children to toxic radiation waves?), McCarthy took to the air to rant about Charlie Sheen's revelation that he has HIV. During her "acting" "career," McCarthy appeared as Sheen's love sex interest on Two and a Half Men, the long-running crime against humanity masquerading as a teevee program.

McCarthy says Sheen never disclosed to her on the set that he had HIV, and that is an OUTRAGE! The fact that Sheen didn't have HIV when McCarthy appeared on the program didn't confound her righteous indignation. Nope, she expected Sheen's psychic foresight to inform her that he would have HIV some time in the future.

But let us assume, as McCarthy did, that Sheen did have HIV when McCarthy shoved her tongue into his facehole on television. So what? As McCarthy pointed out, actors with herpes and cold sores are required to disclose to their fellow actors that they have such conditions, and she wondered aloud to the empty void why actors with HIV don't have to disclose their HIV status:

Before we do a job, we have to sign a piece of paper that says, ‘Do you have cold sores?’ … I’m like, wait a second, if I have to be up front about a herpe [sic], how could you not be up front about HIV? I look back and I’m like, OK, that would have been some valuable information.

Allow us to answer McCarthy's question as simply as possible: because you don't get HIV from kissing, dumdum.

You don't get it from sharing water, you don't get it from spitting, you don't get it from being in the same bathroom, and you definitely don't get it from sneezing, coughing, sweating, swimming, sharing food, or mosquitoes, despite what those ingrates at the Indonesian health ministry "accidentally" said. On the other hand, herpes can be transmitted by touching. All it takes is one peck on the lips from someone with an active sore to spread the virus, which is why actors are required to disclose the presence of herpes if they plan to do any Romeo & Juliet scenes after sixth period PE.

What makes McCarthy's rant so mind-numbing is that she openly acknowledged on the show that she knows HIV can't be transmitted through kissing but decided to do the rant anyway.

Considering that Charlie Sheen's viral load has been treated enough that it is undetectable, even if the two of them had unprotected sex in a David Lynchian hypodermic needle orgy and potluck, it's unlikely she would contract his HIV.

Tara Haelle of Forbes penned a blistering retort to McCarthy, accusing her of following the same idiot logic in regards to Sheen that she had long applied to vaccines and autism:

If we go back to her original rant, her real issue becomes clear. “Playing his love interest on the show, back in the day, I go, ‘Ick! That’s not fair. It’s scary,’” she said on the radio show. Just as she did with vaccines, McCarthy is letting fear determine how she approaches a serious public health issue. There is nothing scary about a person with HIV. And there certainly isn’t anything “ick” about them. The only icky person here is McCarthy, doing what she does best: spreading misinformation and endangering public health.

As Haelle points out, HIV discrimination is a major problem, as it can lead to a loss of housing, education, and employment, and the fear of being outed often drives HIV positive people to not seek medical treatment. What McCarthy is doing is, ONCE AGAIN, driving people to make horrible medical decisions out of nothing but fear. If you have a problem with Charlie Sheen as a person, take a number. But attacking him for bringing his icky cooties around you and your healthy, all-natural, botox-riddled face just opens up the quackery all over your face.

[Pink News / BBC / Al-Monitor / CNN / AIDS Meds / Pink News / Forbes]