If there has been any Constitutional consistency to Scalia’s votes over the years, it would be on the First Amendment. He’s been a somewhat fierce defender of free speech rights (and usually drags Thomas along with him). (Not that he can differentiate between the rights of human beings and inanimate legal constructs – ref. Citizens United.) But apparently not when one of Scalia’s and Thomas’ favorite interests (obsessions?) is concerned.
Today’s SCOTUS decision in Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, Inc. is limited to the First Amendment. And it’s pretty fking pathetic that Alito could get a simple Constitutional question right when a majority in Congress and a POTUS couldn’t. The first paragraph from the Scotus Blog summary is all that is needed to understand the case.
In an opinion by the Chief Justice, the Court held unconstitutional a provision of a statute – called the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003 – that required any group that accepted funding for combatting these diseases abroad to have a “policy explicitly opposing prostitution.” That requirement, the Court held, violates the First Amendment. Justice Scalia filed a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justice Thomas; Justice Kagan did not participate in the case.
This decision is unlikely to garner much public attention because the law it overturned never impacted the lives of Americans to begin with. It only facilitated the contraction of AIDS and the early deaths of an untold numbers of people in South Africa and other countries – a topic of almost zero interest to “liberals/progressives.” Because not only couldn’t Congress and President Bush correctly apply the US Constitution to a law, they were also non-compassionate Christians and science morons.
That legal prohibition required the government of Brazil to choose between PEPFAR funding and an anti-AIDS public health program operated by Davida, an NGO organized by former prostitutes in 1992. A reference point is that the HIV infection rate in South Africa and Brazil in 1990 was similar, approximately 1%. By 2006 the infection rate in South Africa was 12% and 0.6% in Brazil. Putting that in the context of human lives, that translates into over five million infected in S. Africa and just over a million in Brazil with its total population four times that of S. Africa. Brazil went with Davida and S. Africa added anti-retroviral medication for approximately 10% of those infected with HIV to its previous treatment standard of “faith” and showers.
Demonstrating that a dime’s worth of prevention is worth more than a dollar’s worth of cure. And that good public health policies and programs are far more compassionate, efficient, and cost effective than “faith” and PHarma. Not that “conservatives” or “liberals” in this country will heed the lesson.
