Puritanism Kills in Uganda

The web site Talk To Action had a serious and sad story this week. Uganda had been considered one of the success stories in the battle against AIDS. But Uganda's AIDS Commissioner Kihumuro Apuuli recently announced that HIV infections have almost doubled in that country over the past two years.

And what might have been the cause of that?

Uganda was once an HIV prevention success story, where an ambitious government-sponsored prevention campaign, including massive condom distribution and messages about delaying sex and reducing numbers of partners, pushed HIV rates down from 15 percent in the early 1990s to 5 percent in 2001. But conservative evangelicals rewrote this history--with the full-throated cooperation of Uganda's evangelical first family, the Musevenis. As one Family Research Council paper put it:

"Both abstinence and monogamy helped to curb the spread of AIDS in Uganda...How did this happen? Shortly after he came into office in 1986, President Museveni of Uganda spearheaded a mass education campaign promoting a three-pronged AIDS prevention message: abstinence from sexual activity until marriage; monogamy within marriage; and condoms as a last resort. The message became commonly known as ABC: Abstain, Be faithful, and use Condoms if A and B fail."

This warped version of the true Uganda story became the mantra in Bush's Washington, with the "C" reduced more and more to an afterthought as time went by. For example, in piling on against a 2002 pro-condom comment by then Secretary of State Colin Powell, Focus on the Family's James Dobson wrote condoms out of the story entirely: "Secretary Powell seems to be ignorant of the fact that Uganda has made great progress against AIDS by emphasizing abstinence, not condoms." Soon, players connected with the Christian right, from Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse to Anita Smith's Children's AIDS Fund, cashed in to the tune of millions of dollars in federal grants to spread the abstinence message in Uganda, the Christian rights' new showcase for a morality-based approach to AIDS. In the case of Smith's outfit, her proposal was shot down by a scientific review committee, but politics prevailed: the head of U.S. AID overruled the experts and demanded that the program be funded. A disaster for abstinence ideology

You wonder, just what is it that these guys get out of all this? Is it the millions of dollars? Mmm, looking at some of the stuff that has been coming out about the Christian Coalition's Rex Reed suggests that it might be that. There's a lot of money in this holier-than-thou business.

Anita Smith has long been a close ally of Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma senator James Dobson helped get elected who is so fanatically pro-abstinence that he has pushed for warning labels on condoms and once demanded the ouster of the head of the Centers for Disease Control for promoting condom use. Coburn's legislative director, Roland Foster, used to regularly send out Children's AIDS Fund emails trashing HIV prevention organizations for being too sexually explicit and calling for them to be investigated and defunded. (Many were.) Once Coburn, a former Congressman, was elected to the Senate in 2004, President Bush picked Smith to replace Coburn as the head of his Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. Now, according to the State Department email printed below, she's an official U.S. delegate to next week's UN Special Session on AIDS.

Another official U.S. delegate, Melissa Pardue, now a White House functionary, until recently used her perch as a Heritage Foundation policy analyst to supply the Christian right with their talking points on abstinence-only education, forwarding the false claims that multiple scientific studies show that abstinence-only education works (in fact the most persuasive data shows that people who pledge abstinence are at greater risk for getting sexually transmitted diseases) and that the federal government spends far more on comprehensive sex ed (the feds spend almost zero on the latter, but Pardue tiptoes around that by counting all the funds that go to family planning clinics to provide medical care).

There's more.

For some unfathomable reason, certain people are obsessed with anyone having sex with someone they are not legally married to. It's the worst thing in the world to these people, and must be stopped at any cost. We have seen several instances where decisions to literally save lives have been rejected because of some remote chance that someone might be more likely to have sex -- I'm thinking of the controversies over the HPV vaccine and Plan B. To some of us, this is just plain insane. In sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS has killed millions and millions of people. Anything you can do to reduce the chances of the disease spreading, even reducing it by a small amount, needs to be done.

Some people don't like it when I call these people "nuts." It's not intended, I admit, to be a compliment. But somebody has to say it out loud -- this stuff is nonsense. The oh-so-offended wackos in Montgomery County thought they could kick out the entire school board and take over, because the schools were going to have a better condom video and teach some facts about sexual orientation. Listen, this is nutty, it's absurd. Somebody's got to say it. It's dangerous and it's deadly. It's not just a different opinion -- it's wrong.