When it comes to AIDS, conservatives don’t get it

Tackling AIDS/HIV cannot merely be placed on an emphasis of abstinence only education.

The Global Summit on AIDS and the Church at Saddleback Church this past weekend is widely seen as a conservative evangelical gathering in combating AIDS.  Typically, conservative Christians would like to see the promotion of abstinence education as the only tool in heading off the spread of this horrible disease. 

Look no further than the recent and untimely announcement from Focus on the Family’s Senior Director of Government and Public Policy, Peter L. Brandt, urging for cuts to be made to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.

"There's cancer in the fund," said Peter L. Brandt, senior director of government and public policy at the Christian group Focus on the Family. "It does such an unbelievable job in discriminating against faith-based organizations."

Brandt continues:

Nonetheless, Brandt said he wants the government to eliminate all spending on the Global Fund's HIV programs because it is not providing sufficient money to faith groups and has given little support to abstinence messages.

In light of Brandt’s and others’ statements:

Fund officials, worried about the religious right's influence in Congress, are pledging to try to give more money to religious charities. The executive director of the fund, Richard G.A. Feachem , yesterday told 2,000 people at an AIDS conference organized by the influential Saddleback Church in Lake Forest that the battle against the virus "will only succeed if the great faiths of the world become totally mobilized."

Besides the fact that Brandt’s statement was done on the eve of World AIDS Day it is further proof that the conservative Christians simply do not understand the fight they are in.  Senator Barack Obama stood up in front of 2,000 evangelical Christians, likely to be quite conservative, he decided to try to persuade them to understand the issue at hand.

"Let me say this and let me say this loud and clear: I don't think that we can deny that there is a moral and spiritual component to prevention," he declared. "In too many places . . . the relationship between men and women, between sexuality and spirituality, has broken down and needs to be repaired."

Then Obama got to what "may be the difficult part for some," as he put it, that "abstinence and fidelity, although the ideal, may not always be the reality.""We're dealing with flesh-and-blood men and women, and not abstractions," Obama said, and "if condoms and potentially things like microbicides can prevent millions of deaths, then they should be made more widely available. . .

I don't accept the notion that those who make mistakes in their lives should be given an effective death sentence."

This is what we must get in order to make progress against AIDS/HIV.  We must combine both abstinence education and safe-sex education and take our desire to play our own moral highroad out of this policy issue.  It simply does not work.

Uganda was a huge success story in preventing AIDS/HIV infections until abstinence dominated education took over .

But their castle in the sky came crashing down in May, on the eve of a United Nations meeting on AIDS, when Uganda’s AIDS commissioner announced that after years of decline, new HIV infections had almost doubled from 70,000 in 2003 to 130,000 in 2005. Devastating news. 

 

Back in 1986, when Ronald Reagan had yet to make a single public speech about AIDS, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni launched an ambitious HIV prevention campaign, which included massive condom distribution, explicit information about transmission, and messages about delaying sex and reducing numbers of partners. HIV rates dropped from 15 percent in the early 1990s to 5 percent in 2001.

The combination of abstinence and safe-sex education, along with access to condoms, is the best and most effective way to tackle AIDS/HIV.