AIDS: What Works

Joanna Bogle writes:

Jon Snow roundly denounced me for being much too cross and passionate about the people dying of AIDS, in the discussion on tonight's Channel 4 News, and said I wasn't behaving in a Christian way.

Well, I don't know about Christian, but I certainly lost my cool. Here are 22 million people across Africa dying of a deadly disease, and the Church points out that current policies are making things worse - and when we attempt a debate about it on British TV we get a complete block on any attempt at examining the Church's viewpoint.

Home to a battery of denunciations from people writing in to my blog saying how dreadful I was, how ashamed of me they are, how terribly I behaved. I expect they are mostly experienced broadcasters who regularly defend the Church, and the gravely ill, and know how to stay calm when doing so. It's v. nice of them to write so I've posted their comments (see below - but I daresay there'll be lots more...

And:

Now here are the facts, and if I wasn't allowed to say them on TV, I can put them here instead.

The Pope has noted, correctly, that giving out condoms is certainly not saving any lives in Africa and is contributing to the problem of AIDS. Think it through properly. What spreads the disease is sexual contact with people who are infected. Distribution of condoms has led to an overall widespread increase in casual sexual contacts, as people have been told that casual sex can now be made "safe". The information that, in a controlled experiment, a condom works as a method of prevention, has to be presented against the actual overall increase in the opportunities for infection to occur. In other words, it's not just "method" that matters but the actual reality. Most sexual encounters with infected people do not occur in the circumstances that the condom-distributors have planned.

Remember, only one sexual encounter with an infected person is required to receive this deadly disease. So promotion of any policy that promotes increased sexual encounters is going to increase the overall chances of further AIDS cases day by day.

The Church offers a 100 per cent measure that will protect you from AIDS - no sexual contact with an infected person. And this works. In the Philippines, where the first cases of AIDS were reported, the Church's policies were implemented - and it has a miniscule rate of AIDS. In Thailand, condoms were promoted instead, and the death toll from AIDS is high and still rising - and the tragedy of child prostitution has grown to massive proportions.

On the TV programme we were told that 22 million people had died from AIDS in Africa. The condom policies aren't working. Why not try the alternative which works?

Certain people might consider applying some journalistic or scientific objectivity to the question of where in Africa the condom use relentlessly promoted by Western NGOs and compliant governments has ever arrested, never mind reversed, the rate of HIV infection. There is nowhere.

However, such a reversal is under way in Uganda, where the government's message is the same as the Catholic Church's: "Change Your Behaviour". Huge numbers of condoms have been distributed in Botswana, and the result has been for President Festus Mogae to declare, "Abstain or die".

Who, exactly, is incapable of fidelity within a monogamous marriage and abstinence outside such a marriage? Women? Black people? Poor people? Developing-world people? Or just poor black women in the developing world?