Defensive Responses to Critiques of Hillary's "Misstatement" About Reagans and AIDS: What Do They Portend for Future of Democratic Politics?

I've been noticing an interesting (yes, that word again) thing lately in comments in my circles of Facebook friends. I'd like to think out loud about this interesting thing now, in dialogue with any of you who might care to respond to my meandering thoughts here.

Paul Vallely and Patricia Miller on the Pope's Failure in Africa: "How Gays Are Treated Is Fundamental to the Future of the Universal Church"

I am not by any means the only person giving testimony about how Pope Francis's silence regarding the threat to LGBT lives in Africa radically undermines his "reform" agenda for the Catholic church. Today's New York Times carries an essay by papal biographer Paul Vallely entitled "The Pope's Failure in Africa." Vallely's testimony is critically important because he has been a strong defender of Francis and a promoter of his reform agenda. 

Bob Shine on Pope Francis's Silence About LGBT People in Africa, and How This Silence Colors His Message of Good News

Bob Shine of New Ways Ministry on Pope Francis's silence about LGBT people in Africa, and how this silence colors his message of good news to the world:

On World AIDS Day, What Message of Good News Do Catholic Leaders Have for People Affected by HIV — After Pope Francis's Trip to Africa?

Yesterday was World AIDS Day. What was the official, unambiguous statement of good news offered by the leaders of the Catholic church to the world on World AIDS Day, regarding an illness that remains epidemic and lethal in particular in the continent of Africa?

Ken Briggs on the Shocking "No Big Deal" Approach of Pope Francis to Questions About Catholic Position on Condom Use and AIDS — The Moral Limits of Pretending That Some People Don't Exist

As Ken Briggs notes today in National Catholic Reporter, the "no big deal" approach Pope Francis appears to take to some issues causes him to hard-sell some topics (e.g., the need to respond to climate change), while soft-pedaling or bypassing others. The latter category includes, Briggs suggests, how the Catholic church should respond to LGBT people and to the use of condoms to combat the spread of HIV.

Translating the News: Immigrants as Targets, Gays as Targets, Women as Targets, Religion as Vehicle — Some Common Threads in Recent News Stories

The news is often written in code. The news is a foreign language that calls on us, wherever we are in the world, to translate it. 

A Postscript to "Normal Heart" Discussion: An Entry from My Journal of July 1992, re: the Death of a Longtime Friend from AIDS

As a postscript to what I posted last week about Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart" and to the discussion that posting evoked about the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, it occurs to me to share with you a journal entry I wrote in July 1992. Steve and I were in New Orleans at the time, teaching courses for the Institute for Ministry at our alma mater, Loyola University in New Orleans. Here's what I wrote in my journal:

We Watch "Normal Heart," and Think of Our Recent Marriage and Friends Who Went Before Us

Steve and I watched "Normal Heart" this past week, and as we did so, how could we not think about the story it told without viewing it through the optic of our recent marriage? I don't mean (I hope) that I'm obsessed with talking about and seeing things through the optic of our marriage.

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: Mary Ann McGivern Speaks of Brothers' Death from AIDS, Fellow Catholics Pile On

Sister of Loretto Mary Ann McGivern publishes a thoughtful (and anguished) statement about how her family's struggle to deal with the death of two of her brothers from AIDS brought them into close contact with real-life gay folks. She points out that the experience of rubbing shoulders with real human beings who happen to be gay has significantly changed how many American Catholics think about issues of sexual orientation.

Birthdays: Mark Doty and My Brother

Three Lindsey Brothers and Father, 1953, Columbus, Mississippi

Today is Mark Doty's birthday.  It also happens to be my brother's birthday, and I note in this piece about Doty at Box Turtle Bulletin that my brother and Doty were born on the same day in the same year.  Doty's Heaven's Coast, chronicling his partner Wally Roberts's long battle with and eventual death from AIDS, was one of the more moving narratives I read during the acute years of the AIDS crisis, as many of us lost friends and family members with a regularity that made the heart beat lead, day following after day.  (The other, and perhaps my favorite, memoir in the same vein that sticks particularly in my mind is Fenton Johnson's Geography of the Heart).

In Catholic News: Reaction to Lynn Sentence, AIDS, and Scottish Catholic Leaders

Having a Conversation

*In Catholic news today (I'm shoehorning a lot of material into my postings today in anticipation of our upcoming trip and my blogging hiatus next week):

In the News as Week Ends: AIDS, Condoms, Moral Norms

More news commentary I've found worth reading this week: these articles focus on questions about HIV-AIDS, condoms, human rights, social justice, and morality as the XIX international AIDS conference comes to Washington, D.C.:

Matthew Shepard's Birthday and World AIDS Day: In Remembrance

Jamaica Kincaid's "My Brother": A Meditation on the Price of Connection

What I am writing now is not a journal; a journal is a daily account, an immediate account of what occurs during a certain time.  For a long time after my brother died I could not write about him, I could not think about him in a purposeful way.  It was really a short time between the time that he became sick and the time that he died, but that time became a world.  To make a world takes an eternity, and eternity is the refuge of the lost, the refuge for all things that will never be or things that have been but have lost their course and hope to recede with some grace, and even I believe this to be true, though I also have no real way of measuring it.

Jamaica Kincaid writing of the death of her brother Devon Drew of AIDS in 1996 (My Brother [NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997], pp. 91-2).

Gays and Generativity: The Significance of Non-Biological Generativity for the Human Community

From a journal entry dated September 1990:

People argue that homosexuality is abhorrent because non-generative. But generativity clearly occurs in non-biological, non-physical ways. When opponents of homosexuality encounter that recognition, however, they often retort that God has equipped humans to generate biologically, and that gays fly in the face of nature by not conforming to this divine biological plan. In other words, they respond with a tautology: God made human beings to procreate biologically; procreation itself proves that God made human beings to procreate. And so the assertion that God made human beings to procreate biologically must be true, because it proves itself true.

The idea struck me recently: God is the supreme model of non-biological generativity. “In the beginning was the Word”—the Word proceeds eternally from the Father, begotten, not made. Of course we birth others in non-physical ways. Gays are in the business of giving birth everywhere, in manifold ways, just as many others are in the business of giving birth who never conceive or bear a child physically. What incalculable damage does the human race do to itself when it allows generations of talented and loving people to be marginalized, shut out from contributing to society even when their gifts are apparent? What damage does the human race do to itself if it faces the ravages of AIDS on this generation of gay men with apathy or even glee that gay men are suffering and dying now, their talents, contributions, generative impulse obliterated from the face of the earth?

The AIDS Crisis and the Church: The Churches' Calling to BE Church

From journals of September 1990:

I've been thinking of an idea I sketched in journals last year about an article on AIDS and the church.* It strikes me more and more that the primary obligation of the church to the gay community today is healing. And as the etymology of the word “heal” suggests, churches can heal people only by recognizing and wanting their wholeness. This seems key to the church’s mission of healing, if it's going to claim that it really wants to offer healing to those living with HIV and AIDS.

If abundant empirical evidence suggests that people harm themselves and are harmed by others when their sexual identity is denied, then the church has a moral imperative to heal by affirming the wholeness of the gay person. You can't deny a part of a human being, or ask him or her to deny an integral part of his/her makeup, and claim to be about healing.

Central to any project of describing/defending such an ethic of acceptance, it seems to me, is defending the notion that we make world, that the social construction of reality includes the construction of the self as a sexual person. This cannot of course militate vs. the recognition that people’s orientation is also a “given”—but a given to be achieved, consolidated, as a task.

* I did write and publish this article. “The AIDS Crisis and the Church: A Time to Heal” appeared in Theology and Sexuality 2 (1995), 11-37, and was then reprinted in Christian Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender, ed. Adrian Thatcher and Elizabeth Stuart (London: Eerdmans and Gracewing, 1996), 347-66. For those who want to read the full article, it's now online.

Benedict, Bush, and Condoms in Africa: The Rest of the Story

There’s a fascinating array of op-ed statements the last several days, re: the pope’s recent statement that condoms not only don't solve the problem of AIDS in Africa, but make it worse (1). Much of the commentary in the secular media in the U.S. is critical of the pope’s statement. Newspapers with a history of promoting the faith-based abstinence-only approach of the Bush administration and the Republican party, however, have been publishing editorials applauding the pope for standing up for morality.

A statement that particularly impresses me is Pius Kamau’s “Pope’s Words Poison” in the Denver Post (2). Some choice quotes:

A misfortune of the AIDS epidemic in Africa has been intellectual dishonesty, ignorance and tribal superstition. So much bizarre and retrograde thinking has led to the needless deaths of millions. . . . Pope Benedict's pronouncement serves to confuse an already murky picture and to reinforce ignorance. It is particularly unfortunate because its source is "infallible." To many poor, downtrodden Africans, the Vatican is just this side of Heaven and the pope's voice is that of Jesus Christ. . . .

I can't be faulted if I conclude, like many others, that Pope Benedict lacks empathy for his black flock. Driving all pronouncements by the Vatican against condoms is the Vatican's abhorrence of all forms of contraception, no matter the consequence of their denial. As Rebecca Hodes of the Southern African Treatment Action Campaign said, "Religious dogma is more important than the lives of Africans."

That millions more might die and millions of kids orphaned is insignificant for the Pope as it was to narrow-minded African leaders like Thabo Mbeki.

I agree with the pope when he advocates abstinence, celibacy and marital sex. In Africa, they are alone insufficient. Pope Benedict must acknowledge that human beings are fallible; our sins shouldn't cause our demise.

In the end, the pope's words were unwise, shortsighted and unjustified.

Pius Kamau is a surgeon in Colorado who was raised in Kenya. His article notes that he has had many family members and friends die of AIDS.

Writing in the Hartford Courant (3), Steven Michels maintains that Benedict puts doctrine ahead of lives:

In any case, the real problem with the church's position is not that it's shoddy science; it is that it's immoral. It means more people will get infected, fewer people will get treatment and more people will die.

Michels notes the outrage recently directed by some Catholic groups at Connecticut legislators Andrew McDonald and Michael Lawlor recently, and wonders if people will challenge Benedict’s dangerous statements about the link between condoms and AIDS control in Africa as fervently as they have challenged McDonald and Lawlor:

It would be nice if the recent outrage directed at Connecticut state Rep. Michael P. Lawlor and state Sen. Andrew McDonald and their call for transparency in parish finances were matched by an equal or greater outrage at the pope's disregard (if not contempt) for the people of Africa. It would seem we have come to expect so little from our religious leaders.

When the pope goes to Africa and tells people that using condoms is wrong, he is not a preacher of love; he is a preacher of death.

Michels is an associate professor of political science at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, National Catholic Reporter’s “inhouse Vaticanologist (and pinch-hitting papal spinmeister)” John Allen puts a positive spin on the pope’s statement—as American Catholic centrists in general are doing—in an article entitled “Pope’s Condom Message Resonates with Many” (4).

I find it particularly disheartening to read the commentary at this and other websites of the American Catholic center. Sadly, it validates Pius Kamau’s judgment that many of us (including large numbers of American Catholics) have come to trade in intellectual dishonesty and ignorance as we defend our positions on sexual morality—positions that ultimately have far more to do with politics than religion. This commentary also proves Dr. Kamau right when he observes that many of us seem intent on consigning millions of our African brothers and sisters to death in order to uphold our cruel dogmatic politicized positions about sexual morality in the face of common sense and human decency.

The designation of John Allen as NCR’s inhouse Vaticanologist and pinch-hitting papal spinmeister is by Craig B. McKee of Hong Kong in another current NCR thread (5).

Meanwhile, right-wing Catholic publications like Denver’s Catholic News Agency are promoting the research of Edward C. Green, a Harvard AIDS prevention researcher who denies the efficacy of condoms as a way of ending AIDS in Africa (6). Interestingly enough, though Green’s position is being offered by all kinds of right-wing websites recently as a defense of the pope’s statement, I find none—not one—of the publications citing Green makes any mention at all of the fact that President Bush appointed him in July 2003 to his Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (7) (8).

Why not, I wonder—why not mention the connection between Edward C. Green and Bush’s failed abstinence-only approach? Why not mention the political connections of someone who offers scientific verification that condoms don’t solve the AIDS crisis in either Africa or the United States, and who is being promoted as a trustworthy expert in the field?

To his credit, David Gibson is one of the few folks writing about Benedict’s statements re: condoms and Africa recently who notes Green’s ties to the Bush administration. At his Pontifications blog, Gibson writes (9),

In “AIDS and the Churches: Getting the Story Right,” an April 2008 story in First Things, Edward C. Green and Allison Herling Ruark argue that condoms are not the answer at all. They also cite a 2007 article in The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, which listed "Ten Myths" about AIDS prevention, including that condoms are ineffective.

They don't mention that the author of the piece was James D. Shelton, MD, science advisor at the U.S. Agency for International Development under George W. Bush. Shelton apparently isn't as categorical about condoms (the Lancet piece is behind a firewall) as the First Things authors, either.

Interesting, isn't it? Look at who's defending Benedict's stand on condoms, and you immediately bump into "experts" from the Bush administration, people who helped craft and fight for his failed faith-based abstinence-only approach to issues of human sexuality. They're everywhere now, propping up Benedict's counterfactual, dogmatic, and highly politicized statement about condoms and Africa.

As if Bush were still president . . . . As if his policies had not failed, and spectacularly so . . . . As though it is not time to try something new, something that might work, for a change, and that might respect scientific findings and put saving human lives first and foremost . . . .

Benedict's statement about condoms in Africa is powerfully allied to the failed faith-based abstinence-only policies of the Bush administration, which were driven by the political needs of the religious right and not by authentic religiosity or human decency. In offering his judgment on condoms in Africa, Benedict seeks to bolster that failed (and anti-religious and inhumane) approach to issues of sexuality.

He does so to defend politicized views of sexual morality which the church believes it is essential to maintain in developed nations. Unfortunately, those who pay the price for that Western political agenda are the poor people of Africa, whose lives are at stake as pastoral leaders of the developed nations play callous games with their lives.

(1) http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/03/condoms-cause-aids-cruel-twisted-logic.html

(2) http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_11962698

(3)http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/commentary/hc-michels-pope-condoms.artmar22,0,3108161.story

(4) http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/popes-condom-message-resonates-many

(5) http://ncronline.org/news/popes-move-called-grave-mistake

(6) http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=15445

(7) http://www.nationalreview.com/books/sylva200404301423.asp

(8) http://www.washblade.com/2003/8-22/news/national/minordis.cfm

(9) http://blog.beliefnet.com/pontifications/2009/03/was-the-pope-right-about-condo.html

Condoms Cause AIDS: The Cruel, Twisted "Logic" of Right-Wing Christian Opposition to Condoms

22 million people have got AIDS now because of the condom campaign. It’s making it worse, not better!

I blogged recently about the maleficent right-wing discourse that forms the backdrop to the pope’s recent statement that condoms do not inhibit the spread of AIDS but make the epidemic worse (here). As my posting notes, centrist American Catholic apologists for Benedict and the status quo are deliberately missing the point, when they ask what the pope could have, might have, must have meant by his remarks about condoms and AIDS.

The pope’s intent in stating that condom use does not solve but deepens the AIDS crisis is clearly evident in the bogus science and cruel ideological distortions promoted by right-wing political and religious groups who adamantly oppose distribution of condoms in Africa and elsewhere. One of those ideologues appeared on British television this week: Joanna Bogle, a Catholic journalist and theology student at Maryvale Institute in Birmingham, England. The statements that form the epigraph of this posting—22 million people have got AIDS now because of the condom campaign; [condoms are ] making it worse—are from a panel discussion recently moderated by Jon Snow on a British television station (here).

Following her embarrassing rant on Jon Snow’s program, Joanna Bogle has continued fiercely to defend her position that condoms are causing the AIDS crisis, not addressing it. She defends this position on her blog against fellow Catholics who do not subscribe to her extreme ideological position, and who tell her she is an embarrassment to them as Catholics.

In response to these critics, Bogle states,

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". . . .

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. (here).

Bogle also maintains that her primary interest vis-a-vis condoms concern for those dying of AIDS (here). In opposing the availability and distribution of condoms—passionately so—and in promoting what she characterizes as “the” Catholic position and the Holy Father’s position—Bogle is only trying to save lives, and to succor those now dying of AIDS.

Something is clearly wrong with this picture. And it baffles (and appalls) me that American Catholics of the center apparently don’t see this, just as they apparently do not see the sharp knives hidden in other aspects of traditional Catholic sexual morality. This is another of those cases in which Catholic sexual morality, in all its far-flung implications, simply misses the point—spectacularly so. Human experience and human behavior do not conform to rational schemes imposed from on high by those who know better than the mere mortals with whose lives they are playing as they impose their rational absolutes.

The “logic” of the position Bogle is defending (and this is, indeed, the position Benedict promotes with his comments, notwithstanding the attempts of my centrist brothers and sisters to spin his words in a more moderate direction) could not be starker, clearer—and more wrong:

1. People get AIDS through sexual contact.
2. Increase the possibility of casual sexual contact, and you increase the possibility that AIDS will spread.
3. The only absolute safeguard against the spread of AIDS is abstinence and/or monogamous sex within one relationship for life.
4. People who get AIDS have behaved immorally, because they have not been abstinent and/or have violated their monogamous marital relationship.

Logical, no? Ironclad in its demonstrable proofs, no? And totally wrongheaded? Yes, absolutely so.

People do not behave like logical automatons. People's behavior cannot be predicted logically in the same way that one can predict the trajectory of a pinball launched into a pinball machine. People are unpredictable. People are weak. People do what is unexpected. People know better but do not always do better.

When one takes those incontrovertible facts about human behavior and translates them into a situation in which unpredictability, weakness, inability to do what is logically correct and mandated from on high may expose people to death, one has a strong, overriding moral responsibility to prevent death. Even if preventing death means questioning less compelling moral norms such as the obligation to be chaste. The opposition of right-wing Christian ideologues to condom use in the AIDS epidemic is all about increasing the chances that people will die, while we uphold doctrinal purity in the most draconian ideological way possible.

And it's not just “immoral” people who “deservedly” get AIDS who will die Innocent people. Babies who become infected even before they have been born. Women whose husbands sleep with someone infected with HIV and then have sex with their wives. Prostitutes whose livelihood depends on having sex and who have little control over the decisions of those with whom they have sex—who may, in fact, be coerced by their clients. People who are raped and coerced into having sex. Teens just discovering erotic drives and lacking sound information about all that is entailed in their choice (or propulsion) to be sexually active.

These are the people right-wing Christian ideologues would expose to lethal illness—to death—by their insistence that condoms are part of the problem and not the solution to the AIDS crisis. These are the people about whom they claim to care, as they crusade against condoms.

These human beings are clearly simply the human fallout in ideological wars that have nothing at all to do with the human beings who happen to die in these wars. The resistance to condoms in places like Africa is not, ultimately and sadly, about Africans, or poor people, or women (or girls) coerced into having sex in brutally patriarchal cultures in which women do not have the power to say no.

This resistance is all about keeping Catholic sexual morality hard, fast, and secure in the developing nations of the world. It is a resistance to the control that more and more women have over their destinies, bodies, and reproductive lives since the advent of the birth control pill. It is, above all, an adamant, cruel, opposition to the claims of gay and lesbian brothers and sisters on the rest of the body of Christ.

What Benedict and Joanna Bogle are defending is ideology, not the gospel. An ideology that they intend to maintain at all cost, as if the church's future and the whole meaning of the gospel depends on that immutable ideology. Because they have invested everything in this ideology. Because they believe that questioning it or allowing others to question it will lead to crucial changes in church and society that they do not intend to permit. Because questioning or allowing others to question this ideology may open the door to women's empowerment in the Catholic church and to the welcome of gay and lesbian human beings.

When any ideology finds its way to the top of the canon of revealed truth—though it is not revealed truth—and when that ideology clearly links to callousness about the lives of real human beings, innocent human beings, weak and fallible human beings—we have departed from the gospels. Nothing about the insistence that condoms do not prevent but help spread AIDS is rooted in the gospels—despite the loud insistence of those promoting this position that it is the only valid, the only thinkable, Catholic position.

Shakin', Rattlin', Rollin': American Catholic Centrists Parse Benedict on Condoms

Asked on Tuesday if condom use is warranted in Africa where many people on that continent are dying in an ongoing AIDS epidemic, Pope Benedict XVI stated that use of condoms will not stop the AIDS epidemic in Africa and may even make matters worse (here).

People of good will around the world find this position incomprehensible and even malevolent. As an editorial in today’s New York Times (here) states,

As reported on Tuesday by journalists who accompanied the pope on his flight to Africa, Benedict said that distribution of condoms would not resolve the AIDS problem but, on the contrary, would aggravate or increase it. The first half of his statement is clearly right. Condoms alone won’t stop the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. Campaigns to reduce the number of sexual partners, safer-sex practices and other programs are needed to bring the disease to heel.

But the second half of his statement is grievously wrong. There is no evidence that condom use is aggravating the epidemic and considerable evidence that condoms, though no panacea, can be helpful in many circumstances.

Grievously wrong: authoritative bona fide studies, too numerous to list, show that making condoms available and promoting their use slows down the spread of HIV. Grievously wrong: human lives are at stake in the AIDS epidemic, including the lives of children infected from birth by mothers carrying the virus. Grievously wrong: making condoms available and promoting their use saves human lives, including the lives of tiny, vulnerable human beings who must struggle with a lethal infection from the day they are born.

The pope is grievously wrong. His facts are grievously wrong. And because he has chosen to believe grievously wrong facts, his moral insights are grievously wrong—about this issue of human well-being in a continent struggling against many odds.

The New York Times has no problem seeing this: the pope is grievously wrong. And it has no problem saying it.

American Catholics of the center do have a problem with that analysis, however. Read their meandering ruminations on the papal statement about condoms, and you’ll see more shakin’, rattlin’, and rollin’ than you may have encountered since King Elvis took his act to the Lord’s throne. Parsing. Explaining. Justifying. Pretending.

It’s revolting. And yet it’s where we are, at the center; it’s where the knowledge class of the American Catholic church is, at the center of the church. In a defensive bubble in which the plain sense of a New York Times editorial represents an attack on “the” church and its unassailable positions.

For the centrist apologists for power and the status quo, the pope isn’t talking about condoms as a failure, per se (though aren’t there those studies showing that condoms may not really work to stop HIV transmission?): he’s talking about sexual immorality as a failure. He’s encouraging people to be abstinent. To marry and then have sex inside the bonds of holy wedlock. He’s recognizing that this is the only—the only ultimate—solution to the AIDS crisis.

Our truths are, that is to say, the truth: the only truth. The truth the world needs in order to reach salvation. And we manufacture those truths from the center, from our cloistered, protected, well-heeled places—ivory towers and Vatican palaces and cushy jobs at prestigious Catholic universities. Where we are not permitted to say that black is white if we have been told that our truth mandates calling white black.

And meanwhile people are dying. Babies are dying. And there is abundant, irrefutable evidence that condoms might prevent those babies from being infected with a lethal illness.

What would Jesus do?

It is hard not to believe that the centrist apologists who are shakin’, rattlin’, and rollin’ for power do not know that the discourse they are trying to explain away is rooted in a broader discourse of maleficent statements about condoms and contraception. In parsing the papal statement about condoms, the centrist apologists for power and the status quo are implicitly defending ideological positions of the far right that have done all they can to muddle the discussion about condoms and contraception—to mislead the public through scientific misinformation and outright lies.

As Michael Bayly notes today in a posting entitled “The Pope’s Message of Ignorance in Africa” at his wild reed blog, this is not the first time that important Catholic leaders have claimed condoms do not prevent spread of HIV (here). Benedict is not speaking in a vacuum here—the kind of vacuum that “explanations” on centrist American Catholic blogs are now presupposing, as they wonder if Benedict meant this or that by his statement—as they wonder if he did not really mean that condoms are ineffective in preventing transmission of AIDS.

Bayly notes links between the belief of important Catholic leaders that condoms do not prevent the spread of HIV, and disinformation disseminated by such powerful right-wing anti-family planning organizations as the American Life League and Human Life International. As he notes, these groups aggressively question the value of condoms in addressing the AIDS epidemic. They promote misinformation including the claim that the HIV virus passes through the latex of the condom. They claim that condoms have an excessively high “failure rate.”

If you doubt what Bayly is saying about these groups, I suggest you vist the website of the American Life League (here), enter “condoms” into the search engine at the top of its homepage, and then take a gander at the 152 hits you’ll find re: condoms and all they they do not do, in the view of ALL—including stop the spread of AIDS.

Then if you haven’t had enough “information” that you will never discover in any credible science book, click around the site further and let it “inform” you—e.g., about how birth control pills really cause abortion even when they are not abortifacient pills, and how the availability of contraception leads to a pro-abortion mentality.

Haven’t had enough? Want more “information”? Head on over to the website of the powerful Father Thomas Euteneur at Human Life International. Check out its condom database with its condom “facts” (here). Then, if you can stomach it, click on Rev. Euteneur’s “Spirit and Life” blog archives, and take a glimpse at his views on topics other than condom failure and microscopic holes in latex (here).

You might be surprised at what you find there, in the blog statements of this powerful Catholic priest in good standing—e.g., the claim that President Obama, a “confirmed champion of the culture of death,” is guilty of a mind-boggling series of ethical violations in his first two weeks in office (here). These include: being the first President-elect to be investigated by the FBI; hiring a lobbyist per day in his first two weeks in office; hiring an “extreme pornographer” in the Justice Department; hiring someone in the same department who “helped to kill Terri Schiavo”; and taking steps with his Secretary of State to “fund the international killers to the teeth for a new reign of terror on the unborn worldwide.”

Who knew? And isn’t it marvelous that the previous president demonstrated no lapses in ethics significant enough to elicit commentary of this sort from the good, orthodox, faithful Catholic priest, Father Euteneur?

Without the website of Father Thomas J. Euteneur, we would be sorely lacking in accurate information not only about condoms, but about the Machiavellian inner workings of the new presidency.

These are the kinds of people with whom our brothers and sisters of the American Catholic center put themselves in bed, when they parse Benedict’s statement about condoms and preventing AIDS in Africa. Guys and gals of the power seats, you can surely do better than this. When human lives are at stake, seeking and telling the truth is imperative. As the New York Times editorial concludes,

Even so, health authorities consider condoms a valuable component of any well-rounded program to prevent the spread of AIDS. It seems irresponsible to blame condoms for making the epidemic worse.

Irresponsible, indeed. Not to mention cruel. And unpastoral. And deeply unChristian.

HBCUs and CDC Data about New HIV Infections: Head in Sand

I’ve blogged here a number of times about how my work in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) has increased my concern for LGBT African-American youth who are too infrequently offered positive role models as they deal with questions of sexual orientation (see, e.g., http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/soul-work-holy-conferencing-in_05.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/holy-conferencing-as-love-building.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/barack-obama-and-post-homophobic-models.html).

I’ve written about how my attempt to create a safe dialogic space within the HBCUs at which I worked for open, respectful, honest discussion of questions of sexual orientation not only met a stone wall, but how I was punished for calling for such a discussion. I’ve noted the historic tendency of HBCUs (almost all of which are church-affiliated) to sweep discussions of sexual orientation under the rug, to pretend that gay administrators, gay faculty, gay staff, and gay students simply don’t exist (on this, see “Gay and Black: They Don’t Mix at Too Many Historically Black Universities,” www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1284).

Given my history at HBCUs and my concern that all young people who are coming to terms with their adult identities have a safe, nurturing environment with positive role models in which to deal with this life passage, I’m disturbed—no, I’m downright disgusted—to read the latest Center for Disease Control (CDC) figures on HIV infection in the U.S. (see www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=6971, http://signorile2003.blogspot.com/2008/09/new-study-on-hiv-transmission.html). These figures show that gay and bisexual black men 13 to 29 years old now have the highest rate of new infection in the nation. They also show that among women, black women have the highest infection rates.

I say these figures are disgusting because of the (non)response of most HBCUs and the churches that sponsor HBCUs to these data. The new figures show that the group contracting HIV is precisely the demographic age group served by HBCUs. Who have known there is a problem. And who have stood by and done nothing, thus contributing to the problem.

It’s time for HBCUs and their sponsoring churches to get their heads out of the sand.

When young men and young women are being infected by HIV because no one will talk about it—or about sexual orientation—and no one will admit that some people are gay, and that some gay men disguise their orientation in environments that will not allow them to be public and sleep with both men and women, infecting unsuspecting women, it’s time to get serious.

If church-sponsored HBCUs are about what they claim to be about—opening doors to a bright future for all students—they are failing lamentably in their mission to educate all students, and to help a segment of their population, when they choose to duck and dodge questions of sexual orientation, and to bash gay administrators, faculty, and staff who ask for the right to live openly and with respect as gay persons.

HBCUs that behave this way are denying gay students positive role models. They are failing to prepare students for life in a real world in which coming to terms with sexuality, period, is part and parcel of growing up. They are contributing to a culture of silence whose ultimate outcome may be death for some young people. They are facilitating ignorance and prejudice.

And they are doing so in the name of a God who does not, I propose, stand on the side of such ignorance and prejudice. Or on the side of death.

If I had the magical ability to speak to all HBCU presidents at once about this issue, I think I’d ask them to consider very carefully how they would behave, if they knew it was their own son or daughter they were exposing to misery, illness, and possible death by contributing to this culture of shameful silence and gay-bashing.

When we frame moral questions as questions that are about people we know and love and want to cherish, they have a wholly different complexion, don’t they?