Prostitution Puts U.S. and Brazil at Odds on AIDS Policy - New York Times

Prostitution Puts U.S. and Brazil at Odds on AIDS Policy - New York Times: "But the Brazilian approach is anathema to many conservatives in the United States because it makes use of methods seen as morally objectionable. Brazil not only operates a needle and syringe exchange program for drug addicts but also rejects the Bush administration's emphasis on abstinence, being faithful and the controlled use of condoms, the so-called ABC approach, in favor of a pragmatism that recognizes that sexual desire can sometimes overwhelm reason.

'Obviously abstinence is the safest way to avoid AIDS,' Dr. Chequer said. 'But it's not viable in an operational sense unless you are proposing that mankind be castrated or genetically altered, and then you would end up with something that is not human but something else altogether.'

'If we increasingly focus the prevention of AIDS along these lines, we are generating carnage, a slaughter,' he said. 'It's not a realistic vision, and the epidemic is going to grow larger and larger.'

Brazil, of course, is not the only country to have been affected by the American policy. Senegal has one of the lowest H.I.V. prevalence rates in Africa, but has been cut off from the Bush administration initiative, public health experts said, because prostitution has been legal there since 1969. And in Central American countries like Guatemala, religious groups supported by American financing have distributed fliers to prostitutes urging them to adopt the ABC approach."

This article is very poorly written. I assume the sticking point is that the religious right doesn't want to give Prostitutes condom education.

Most women do this for money, not for sex. There is no reason to punish them with the aids virus just because they are trying to support themselves and their families. Prostitution is wrong, and I hate it but so is the grinding poverty that causes it.

I really think that some of the people who say the religious right actually likes people dying of aids are probably right. It is more imporatant to punish sex than save lives. My own conclusion is that the religious right are a bunch dullards and they make me ashamed to call myself a Christian!