No kidding. According to the best research we have, from sociologist Peter Bearman at Columbia University and published earlier this year in the Journal of Adolescent Health, the vast majority of participants in abstinence-only programs who pledge virginity go on to have sex. And when they do have sex, they're so unprepared for the experience that they are far less likely to use a condom, and far less likely to seek out medical attention for potential STDs than people who never pledge virginity in the first place. The harm may be limited when you push this stuff on American teens in exurbia. But it's almost incalculable when you try it in a country like Botswana with a 37 percent HIV infection rate, as Bush is doing.

According to the leaked document, Bush administration policy is no longer ABC--abstinence, be faithful, use condoms--a strategy once described to me by a Ugandan AIDS advocate as a three-legged stool. It is now "Abstinence, Being faithful and the correct and consistent use of Condoms for populations engaged in high-risk behaviors." Condoms have become the stool's broken leg, the poor stepchild, reserved for sex workers even in countries where the HIV prevalence is so high that marriage itself is an HIV risk factor.

A devastating new report from the Maryland-based Center for Health and Gender Equity analyzes actual spending on the ground under the president's global AIDS plan. CHANGE found that in 2004, long before this new directive went into effect, 56 percent of all sexual prevention dollars went to abstinence-until-marriage campaigns--far above the congressional guideline. In Nigeria in 2005, the share of prevention spent on abstinence-until-marriage was 69 percent.

Meanwhile, as the AIDS epidemic continues to explode, the United States is sending fewer condoms abroad now than it did 15 years ago, according to the CHANGE report.

As Michelle Goldberg pointed out in a recent post, it's hardly incidental that many of these abstinence-only grants are going to politically connected Christian right organizations such as Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse and the Children's AIDS Fund, to the tune of approximately $10 million each. (The latter group won its grant despite its proposal being rated "not suitable for funding" by the expert review committee, according to the Washington Post. But the head of USAID, Andrew Natsios, intervened to overrule the experts and insist that the group receive the grant.) And as Helen Epstein and others have reported, many of these programs are only thinly veiled attempts at Christian evangelizing. Graham himself, an early booster of Bush's global AIDS program, said in testimony before the Senate in 2000, "This crisis will be curbed only when the moral teachings of God's Word permeate African society."

It's a twofer--political pork and state-sponsored proselytizing--and the only people who pay are the millions who become infected with HIV in Africa for want of condoms and information, and who then face a future without treatment because of Bush's desire to get the smallest bang for his medical assistance dollars by buying only patent-protected HIV meds.