Bush: Death Preferable to Non-Procreative Sex

That’s the only logical conclusion. When criminalized abortion is preferable to safe and legal abortions, when abstinence education is advocated in favor of comprehensive sex ed even in the face of evidence that kids who go through abstinence courses are more likely to have unsafe sex, when a vaccine against an STD that causes cervical cancer is squashed because eliminating the threat would “encourage casual sex,” when a possible HIV prevention pill is criticized for the same reason, there is no other conclusion other than conservatives would rather see you dead than having recreational sex. Period.

And now, to add to the mounting evidence, this: Bush’s AIDS prevention plan is eroding prevention efforts—including mother-to-child transmissions—because it requires such a large percentage of the funding to go to abstinence and fidelity promotion.

The Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator requires that 20 percent of all AIDS spending go for prevention. Half the prevention budget must be spent to stop sexual transmission of HIV. Two-thirds of that spending, in turn, must be used promoting abstinence and fidelity…

In perhaps the largest adjustment, one country cut from $8 million to $4 million its spending on prevention services for couples in which one person has HIV infection and the other does not -- an extremely high-risk group -- as well as on sexually active youths and sex workers…

The abstinence policy "is basically unworkable," said Paul Zeitz, director of the Global AIDS Alliance. "This shows the problem very clearly and starkly."

Proponents of this idiotic policy are big fans of saying things like, “Abstinence is the only 100% effective way to prevent the transmission of HIV,” which is true—except it ignores the reality that abstinence as a prescription for prevention doesn’t work, because people are going to have sex. Some of them will even be people who were abstinent until marriage and have always been faithful to their spouses—spouses who have not been faithful and are now HIV+. (This is particularly a problem for women in poor countries.) So how, exactly, does abstinence and fidelity protect them?

*crickets*

Continually insisting that people just should be abstinent and faithful addresses this problem as if the world is the way Bush & Company want it to be, rather than the way the world really is. Wishing and hoping and praying that people will never engage in unsafe, casual sex is pointless—and it’s killing people. They know this. They see the same evidence we do. And they don’t care.

They say that condoms can be made available as a last resort. But fuck that. Condoms should be flowing like rivers, falling from the skies like rain, in every country where AIDS is wreaking havoc upon its population. Not another single dime should be spent on a billboard, a pamphlet, a button, advocating abstinence until we have made sure that everyone who already is having sex, is having safe sex. Then we can worry about denying innate urges. Until safe sex is the standard, directing the majority of funding toward these ludicrous policies rooted in repression is catastrophically foolish.

But they’d rather see a million dead children than a million free condoms. And that’s the truth. How fucked up is that?