U.S. Blocking International AIDS Deal

The Bush administration, heavily influence by the Christian right, is blocking key proposals for a new United Nations package to combat AIDS worldwide over the next five years because of its opposition to the distribution of condoms and needle exchanges and references to prostitutes, drug addicts and homosexuals.

The United States is being supported by many Muslim countries, including Egypt, and various conservative African and Latin American nations. “There are a lot of unholy alliances all over the place,” said a European official attending UN talks in New York last night.

Fraught negotiations were continuing to try to salvage as much of the package as possible. More than 140 nations are attending the UN summit in New York which began on Wednesday. The meeting is intended to update a 2001 declaration that provided the momentum for a worldwide campaign against AIDS. A new declaration is due to be agreed today.

Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, told the summit: “The world has been unconscionably slow in meeting one of the most vital aspects of the struggle: measures to fight the spread of AIDS among women and girls. These shortcomings are deadly.” (source)

You know the thing that bothers me most about my country today? It isn’t that we have so many points of view that disagree with each other. That is after all, democracy. What bothers me is that our elected officials have been bought out by religion. They are being pimped out by the Christian Right. That’s a good analogy. They Christian Right pays them larges sums of money, mobilizes their forces to keep these bastards in office, then turns around and says to them, “Now, go earn me some money, bitch!”, read, vote the way I want you to vote! And that is when we stopped being a democracy.

Without a cure for AIDS, we’ve come to a point where we won’t even recommend the one thing that has been the most effective weapon against AIDS to date - the condom (pictured left... hey, if it embarasses you to look at it, you can’t talk about it to those who need it, and if an older Jewish lady such as Dr. Ruth can come on national TV and say, “The vagina can accommodate any penis size.”, I think we can talk about condoms, right?). Why is the United States trying to block the use of condoms? Because the religious fanatics don’t believe in the use of condoms.

We are beyond that. I would think that millions of people dying, and millions more being infected each year, would trump their fear of a simple piece of latex material to be placed over a penis prior to sex. That’s just logic and you would think that we could see that.

The same holds true for clean needle exchange. They would say that we are encouraging drug use. Folks, the drug use is already going on and if you know anything about drug addiction, you can’t tell someone that they can’t shoot up because you refuse to give them a clean needle. They will simply find another needle, and they won’t be picky about how clean it is or how many have already used that needle, because their craving for their fix outweighs all other considerations.

The answer, give them a clean and safe needle to shoot up with. Then, deal with the drug addiction problem separately, because that really is a separate (and bigger) issue. At least, they will be alive.

Why can’t my government see this? It’s simple logic. It would attack the disease directly in the absence of a cure against AIDS.

Luckily, my community, who was largely outcast already by the religious creeps driving this, had little problem tell them to go screw themselves. We distributed condoms all over the place. We did the same thing with clean needle exchange programs, and where that wasn’t possible, we distributed bleach to drug users and taught them how to sterilize their needles before drug use.

These are drastic times. People are dying of AIDS, and they don’t need to. For our government to buy into this religiously motivated bullshit is.... GENOCIDE.