India's Health Minister Warns That Gays Are a "Disease"

Gay sex "should not exist" and is "completely unnatural," according to India's health minister, who used a conference on AIDS in New Delhi Monday to make his point.

A video of his speech is circulating online. In it he blames countries such as the United States for exporting the "disease" to India.

"Unfortunately, this disease where a man has sex with another man, found more in the developed world, has spread in our country," said Ghulam Nabi Azad in the speech. "Gay sex is completely unnatural -- it should not exist, but it does."

Estimates say that Azad's country has approximately 2.5 million people living with HIV, a problem he seemed to blame on gay people and how hard it is to find them.

"There's a substantial number of such people in our country, men who have sex with men, but it is difficult to trace them, so we haven't been able to make much progress in identifying them," he said.

If Azad was really looking for gay people, he could have stopped by a Pride rally held this weekend in New Delhi. More than 300 activists reportedly celebrated the anniversary of a 2009 court decision striking down a law that had criminalized gay sex.