another promise broken

Rolling Stone this week has a damning article about the Bush administration's AIDS initiative. You may remember the President announcing it in Janaury 2003. A nice counter to the pounding of the Potomac war drums, it sounded like the sort of thing a compassionate conservative would do -- you know, help poor people in poor countries to avoid contracting HIV/AIDS, and help treat those who do.

Except, as described in Rolling Stone, it hasn't happened quite that way. First, spending the $15 billion promised over five years has been far behind schedule. Unsurprising, because most Bush Administration initiatives of this sort are designed to make a big splash up front; implementation isn't as important as the 6:00 news cycle. No need to dwell on the fact that much of this new money in any case was shifted from other international health programs that the U.S. (sometimes) helps fund.

That's bad enough, but the program has been handed over to fundamental Christians to run. Basically, the Bush AIDS initiative is telling African kids not to have sex, period. Abstinence, abstinence, abstinence, instead of the more common ABC approach -- Abstinence, Be faithful, and use a Condom. Despite the pious wishes of the fundies, abstinence alone is an unrealistic approach, and even being faithful is difficult since it only takes one partner to ruin that.

Even worse than ignoring condoms in US-funded programs, the conservative Republicans running this initiative are forcing Uganda -- a well-known success story in the fight against HIV/AIDS, using the ABC approach -- to quit distributing condoms in schools.

Scandalous isn't a strong enough word; let's try criminal. HIV/AIDS experts fear that Bush's initiative will help raise infection rates in Africa rather than lower them.

But that doesn't matter, does it? As long as the fundamentalist lunatic branch of the Republican party is happy pushing its piety, Bush is happy. And if a bunch of Africans get sick and die, well hell, they're only poor Africans, right? They would have died of something else anyway. Besides, they don't vote in battleground states.

Read the article, there's more. It'll make you realize how there are enough criminal (or criminally stupid, to be charitable) plots in our reality to make it easier for people to believe absurd conspiracy theories like the one about HIV being created by the CIA for the explicit purpose of killing Africans and African-Americans.