LEFTIST MYSTICISM

Condom use increasing in Africa: study (CBC, November 17th, 2006)

Amid all the dire warnings about the AIDS pandemic, researchers announce some good news: Young African women report they are increasingly using condoms with their partners.

The study, published in the British journal The Lancet, analyzed data in 18 African countries from 1993 to 2001, looking at changes in the sexual behaviour of 132,800 women, 15 to 24 years old.

While abstinence rates changed little, the study found that condom use more than tripled, from 5.3 per cent in 1993 to 18.8 per cent in 2001, with a median yearly increase of 1.4 per cent.[...]

The researchers did not comment on the politically charged issue of condom distribution in AIDS control strategies. But Dr. Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Washington-based Global AIDS alliance, said the study provides evidence that the U.S. AIDS program has been misdirected.

Critics say the U.S. program has shifted emphasis from condoms toward abstinence and fidelity, especially among the young. U.S. officials say their three-pronged HIV-prevention strategy, emphasizing abstinence, fidelity and condom use, offers people the best options to protect themselves.

"The data are clear that you need all three components," said Dr. Mark Dybul, the U.S. deputy global AIDS coordinator in Washington. He said the U.S. will ship 486 million condoms worldwide this year, nearly triple the number in 2001.

As the excellent post below explores, modern liberalism has descended from an empirical challenge to ossified tradition and orthodoxy in the name of individual freedom and tolerance to an angry fundamentalist creed that is further and further removed from fact and evidence--and proud of it. Just as American success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions counts for nothing in the face of the symbolism of it’s rejection of Kyoto, so the AIDS industry keeps going to extreme lengths to pretend U.S. policy is anti-condom and based on a sniffy notion that any death from AIDS is just desserts for the immoral. The reason, of course, is that just as the climate change controversy is more about halting Western prosperity than anything to do with climate, so tranzi AIDS programmes battle any suggestion that individual sexual behaviour can and should be controlled. Preventing disease is secondary to de-linking sex and morality. Motivated partly by a collective nihilist self-hatred, partly by a deep and profound racism and partly by rote anti-Americanism, they seem to be approaching the point where they would have us believe that, even with unlimited free condoms, the AIDS virus can be transmitted mysteriously to the celibate and faithful as punishment for their dangerous religious thoughts.