Let’s talk about sex.
OK, now that I’ve got your I’m really here to talk about AIDS and U.S. foreign policy.
Don’t go away, this is important.
Both can make you sick, especially the latter after you read this story in the Washington Post.
From the article:
RIO DE JANEIRO — Paula Duran is an outreach worker with a style of her own. That style — heavy on fishnet, tattoos and suggestive poses — is at the heart of an ideological disagreement between Brazil and the United States over the best way to fight AIDS.
Duran, 35, is a prostitute in Villa Mimosa, a red-light district in this seaside city where an estimated 3,500 sex workers lounge in the doorways and lean out the windows of scarred, decaying buildings.
Each time she snags a customer, she fishes in her purse for a government-supplied condom. Often she repeats information on disease transmission that she learned at a state-funded workshop for prostitutes around the corner.
“I’m always telling people that they should never do anything without a condom,” Duran said. “A lot of the young people who come around here don’t know anything about it, so I try to teach them whatever I can.”
Makes sense to me. People like sex. People who provide sexual services have sex. Recruit them to be AIDS prevention advocates and cut down on the rate of sexually transmitted diseases.
Except U.S. foreign policy is not based off practicalities, of course:
But the U.S. government strongly disapproves of such unorthodox methods. Two weeks ago, Brazil received a letter from USAID declaring the country ineligible for a renewal of a $48 million AIDS prevention grant.
The U.S. government doesn’t like prostitution and will not fund any country that does not formally declare prostitution “dehumanizing and degrading.”
Brazil, which has a successful partnership with the prostitutions to collaborate on the prevention of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, refused to do that. Perhaps it’s cultural, perhaps it’s pragmatic. I don’t know. I don’t particularly care. The program worked.
…the country’s AIDS prevention and treatment programs are considered by the United Nations to be the most successful in the developing world. There are at least 600,000 people infected with HIV in Brazil — but that is only half the number predicted by the World Bank a decade ago.
“When we started in the 1980s, our projected AIDS rates were exactly the same as Africa’s, but now it’s a completely different story,” said Mariangela Simao, deputy director of Brazil’s national HIV-AIDS program in Brasilia. “I’m convinced it’s a result of the way the government has responded. We provide information and resources, and don’t enter into moral or religious issues.”
That of course will not do for the ideologues who set U.S. policy.
Far from the official U.S. policy of abstinence, Brazil has tackled the issue of sex openly.
In the view of the U.S., it is better for people to die of AIDS than to risk an honest discussion on sexual behavior.
Even Pat Robertson seems to grasp the concept of the importance of condoms, according to Sarah Vowell (who I love from afar):
On a recent “Nightline,” Robertson showed up with his new best friend, Clooney. When asked if his group Operation Blessing would promote “the responsible use of condoms” along with abstinence in its AIDS education program in Africa, Robertson answered, “Absolutely.” Pat Robertson!
“I just don’t think we can close our eyes to human nature,” he continued, adding that with regard to teaching proper condom use, “you have to do that, given the magnitude.” I could have hugged him.
It’s time for U.S. AID’s policy to get in line with reality.