Then, this week, Bush once again increased the role of religious groups in America's global AIDS prevention policy.  According to a story on the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare policy, "Faith-based organizations worldwide will play a major role in fighting the AIDS and HIV epidemic under a new initiative announced by President George W. Bush. The 'New Partners Initiative,' outlined by the President during World AIDS day last week, will also seek to build partnerships with overseas organizations that have little or no experience in working with the United States government...The initiative will provide $200 million through fiscal year 2008 for technical and capacity-building assistance that will help such organizations compete for future program grants."

Understand what this means. The reason these faith-based organizations haven't been able to compete for grants is largely because of their lack of infrastructure and experience. Plenty of other groups have both those things, but we're not funding them because they promote safer sex as well as abstinence. The Roundtable story quotes a statement by the Pan-African Treatment Access Movement (PATAM), a coalition of health groups in several African nations:

Under pressure from the American program 'PEPFAR,' [President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] certain African countries have begun, little by little, to adopt a strategy through which the message 'abstinence and faithfulness' is advocated as the only way of preventing the HIV/AIDS epidemic, to the detriment of the universal promotion of the condom which remains to this day the most efficient means of protection against HIV transmission...

We denounce the ideology which governs the Washington program against AIDS (PEPFAR) and which is being imposed in our countries. Instead of contributing positively to the fight against AIDS in our countries, this program will breed serious prejudices and will cause, without doubt, a large number of infections which would otherwise have not taken place.

I've heard similar concerns from African health workers at U.N. conferences. Meanwhile, America's U.N. delegations are increasingly given over to the Christian right -- it's an easy way for the administration to placate the movement without many outsiders noticing. Recent official U.S. delegates to U.N. conferences on women and children have included Janet Parshall, the Christian radio broadcaster, Paul Bonicelli, former dean of academic affairs at Patrick Henry College, and Concerned Women for America's Janice Crouse. These people work tirelessly to scuttle any initiatives that would expand women's access to reproductive health care. (Ironically, they often end up partnering with hard-line Muslim fundamentalists to do so).

Anyone interested in reading about the real-world results of these policies should check out Helen Epstein's phenomenal story about U.S.-based abstinence initiatives in Uganda, which was published in April in the New York Review of Books. As she details, that country's hugely successful approach to HIV-prevention is being undermined by the growing influence of the religious right -- a situation that gets way too little coverage in the U.S.

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