The Enablers of the epidemic - how the Catholic Church sabotages the global fight against AIDS

[Ian David]

The Enablers of the epidemic - how the Church sabotages the global fight against AIDS with deadly effectiveness

Pope Benedict’s recent comments on condoms are the latest manifestation of the plain and painful fact that the priorities of the leaders of the faithful are alarmingly out of order. Africa, the Pope’s latest destination, faces real issues – poverty, disease, famine, totalitarianism, ethnic cleansing and genocide are rampant – and around the world, more than 25,000 people die of hunger every single day. From all the serious problems which confront the planet, the Pope finds it appropriate to choose The Beatles, condoms and sorcery as the targets of his remonstrations. Recently, while conducting a commemorative service for, and paying lip-service to, murderous Chillean dictator Augusto Pinochet, a Catholic bishop found the time to condemn, of all things, Madonna’s lustful conduct during her concerts. Buttressing church doctrine seems to have a high importance for these leaders, and if acquiring more influence is their purpose, these are indeed the ways to get it accomplished. However, if one’s goal is reducing the surplus of human suffering around the world, then one would be better guided by the moral compass of South Park than that of the Catholic Church.

The majority of HIV infections are caused by unprotected sexual acts between heterosexual partners. There are two major popularly-known preventative measures against sexually transmitted HIV. One of them is the use of condoms. It reduces the risk of contracting HIV by 80%, thereby making condoms by far the most effective tool in the fight against the spread of AIDS. The second popular method purported to prevent sexual transmission of the virus, the one that most religious leaders recommend, is sexual abstinence.

As demonstrated by scientific studies, abstinence pledges are not only an ineffective means of preventing teenagers from having sex, but also a harmful one. Young people who commit themselves to abstinence – in most cases in a religious context – end up having a sexual record no different from that of their peers who don’t. The only marked difference between these teenagers and the rest is the fact that they are less likely to use protection.

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Instead of creating awareness and helping in the fight against AIDS by advancing, or at least getting out of the way of, life-saving solutions, they peddle outdated medieval dogma and apply methodologies conceived long before humanity was even aware of the viral cause of disease to modern situations in which the community needs nothing less than the latest advances in medicine, epidemiology and other scientific disciplines. Not only is the church not helping science fight the AIDS epidemic, but it also substitutes itself to science. Needless to say, as anyone can judge by the results, churches are way out of their league. Instead of real relief, the churches advocate “responsibility,” a concept whose vagueness in this context is only equaled by its tragic futility. By responsibility they mostly mean abstinence, and according to all available evidence, any plan based primarily on abstinence is doomed to fail.



More:
http://reasonweekly.com/christopher-hitchens/the-enablers-of-the-aids-epidemic