BushCo Kills African AIDS Victims to Pander to Evangelicals

Good article over at Salon.com about Chimpy's staggeringly misguided International AIDS program.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/02/aids/index.html

Few Americans realize that the money flowing into disease-ravaged locales is being diverted to serve a right-wing political agenda -- at the cost of untold numbers of lives.
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"The fact that the United States can spend $300 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but cannot find a relative pittance to rescue the human condition in Africa -- there is something profoundly out of whack about that,"
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"This group is so convinced they have to do everything by themselves even though they often know the least about the issue," he said. "They reinvent everything -- reinvent it wrong at the beginning, learn along the way, explain that it takes time, and here we are." Where we are, unfortunately, is much like where we were two and half years ago.
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Overlooking the grim realities on the ground, Bush is using AIDS funds to place religion over science, promoting abstinence and monogamy over comprehensive sex education that includes information about and access to condoms.
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"What we're doing is imposing a really misguided and ill-informed ideology on top of a public health crisis," says Jodi Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity in Takoma Park, Md.
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Just as U.S. abstinence-only programs that push partial or false information on teens have doubled under Bush, so are such morality-driven programs cropping up under U.S. auspices in places like Africa -- where the stakes are much higher and a lack of vital information can kill. PEPFAR is fast becoming equated with a notorious emphasis on abstinence education -- nearly $1 billion of Bush's global AIDS pledge is earmarked for abstinence promotion.
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The emphasis on morality is being driven by social conservatives who have made spreading the gospel of abstinence and monogamy to Africans their primary mission. "Condoms promote promiscuity," says Derek Gordon of the evangelical Christian group Focus on the Family. "When you give a teen a condom, it gives them a license to go out and have sex." At a congressional hearing in April, Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., threatened to cut funding for organizations that promote condoms. "The best defense for preventing HIV transmission is practicing abstinence and being mutually faithful to a non-infected partner," Hyde declared. And under a proposal being pushed by Hyde and his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill, Tobias would be given the power to divert even more money toward promoting abstinence. "All can think about is making Africans abstinent and monogamous," says a Democratic staffer. "It's the crassest form of international social engineering you could imagine."
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"Groups know the more they talk about abstinence, the more they'll get U.S. funding. And they fear that if they talk about condoms they'll lose funding -- or, worse, get kicked out of the country."

as I've previously posted. His neocon conservatives like Robertson own diamond mines in Africa, and they want those babies born.

Henry Hyde better look at the joke he is, he admitted a youthful indiscretion while he was in his 40's. God, rid of this GOP plague.

When you give a politician a bible, it gives them a license to go out and promote death at taxpayers expense.

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