New York Times October 15, 2003
Misguided Faith on AIDS
The complete article may be found at http://www.religiousconsultation.org/News_Tracker/misguided_faith_on_AIDS.htm
Quotes--
In August, the United States Agency for International Development abruptly canceled bids for a program to market condoms
to gay men and others in Brazil. When the decision was criticized publicly, the agency reinstated most of the program. This
was the right choice. Preventing the spread of AIDS means working with the groups most at risk.
But the cancellation was just a recent example of the Bush administration's efforts to transform American initiatives abroad
related to sex: AIDS prevention, family planning and sex education. Decisions about these programs ・which can mean
life or death to the people who use them ・are increasingly not based on what saves lives, but on what appeals to conservatives
at home.
Conservatives in Congress monitor the Web sites of the agency and its contractors for references to sex workers, gay men
or drug users, and have forced the agency to discourage these projects. ...
Condoms are also under attack. Bush administration officials have tried to remove international endorsements of condom
use. President Bush's decision to stop the funds for any overseas family-planning group that mentions abortion has also effectively
stopped condom provision to 16 countries and reduced it to 13 others, including some with the world's highest rates of AIDS
infection.
Congress's appropriation for the president's AIDS initiative stipulates that a third of the money for AIDS prevention go
to promote abstinence until marriage ... [This] message has no meaning for gay men or for women who are forced by poverty
into prostitution. In much of Africa, teenage girls ・many of them AIDS orphans themselves ・are coerced into
sex by older, wealthier men. Knowing how to negotiate condom use could save their lives. ...
