The washing machines, the condoms and the Bishop
A couple of recent Vatican related stories have made headlines for all the wrong reasons, as usual. More evidence, as if more were needed, as to the irrelevance of religion to most of our concerns about the human condition.
1. As International Women’s Day is celebrated, the Vatican had a novel message for the women of the world: give thanks for the washing machine. This humble domestic appliance had done more for the women’s liberation movement than the contraceptive pill or working outside the home, said the the official Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano. [Full article here]
2. Declaring that “life must always be protected”, a senior Vatican cleric has defended the Catholic Church’s decision to excommunicate the mother and doctors of a nine-year-old rape victim who had a life-saving abortion in Brazil. [Full article here]
3. The Pope today reignited the controversy over the Catholic church’s stance on condom use as he made his first trip to Africa. The pontiff said condoms were not the answer to the continent’s fight against HIV and Aids and could make the problem worse. [Full article here]
[Alternative take on it here from FoxNews - hilarious semantics]
Words fail me. I just want to scream in the face of the nearest Catholic and ask “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING ASSOCIATING YOURSELF WITH THIS ANACHRONISTIC BULLSHIT? GROW THE FUCK UP AND USE YOUR FUCKING OWN MIND TO FIGURE THIS OUT – SMACKTARD”.
Won’t you join with me in asking this question to as many people that you find who give credibility to the church by giving it support and succour? Because it appears it’s otherwise OK to support kiddie fiddlers and holocaust deniers, but condoms are bad because AIDS is from God, doctors are evil because they give 9 year old girls abortions, and women should be happy to be patronised and treated as a sub-species.
Go figure . . .
Every sperm is sacred eh!
It really is disgusting that such idiocy can reign supreme.
But in many ways it is not surprising that Herr Ratzinger et al fart in the general direction of evidence given the propensity of the Vatican/Catholic Church/Christianity & its followers – and by extension all other similar infantile delusions and servility to a supreme intangible power – to go around basing their beliefs on blind faith alone.
Here’s a brief comment in response to Ratzinger’s claims that might be of interest. Its written by Nathan Geffen and Rebecca Hodes of South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), that wonderful group who took on an inept South African government whose former head considered HIV/AIDS a colonial conspiracy, with no connection between HIV and AIDS, and whose former health minister advocated eating beetroot to treat HIV/AIDS over antiretroviral treatment. TAC also took on and with the support of others defeated the Clinton administration, where Al “Man-Bear-Pig” Gore staunchly bowled for big pharma in their pursuit of patent protection beyond what was legally entitled to them vis-a-vis the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.
Pope’s comments on condoms are wrong and irresponsible
Following the Pope’s discouraging comments in Cameroon over the use of condoms in relation to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Nathan Geffen and Rebecca Hodes of Treatment Action Campaign charge that such papal views are misguided and fly in the face of evidence around the efficacy of both condom use and sex education for adolescents.
Click here to read the rest of the article
While the claims of Ratzinger et al are worrying to some extent, it is heartening to see shifts in thinking on HIV prevention and treatment towards more pragmatic, reality-based approaches (although this is a slow shift).
The claims against condom use and policies that favoured the Abstinence element of ABC Guidance has been a dominant of health policies for many years (and in some countries remains so). This policy advice and practice became particularly entrenched when the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) came into the fray in the early 2000s, legitimising as it did the multiple other smaller fish advocating this nonsense by bringing billions of dollars to back up such programmes.
PEPFAR is a bilateral global health initiative that is ultimately held to account by US Congress (who control the budget allocation annually). In turn they PEPFAR was at times more responsive to the whims of Congress and its right-wing nuts religious constituency that dominated it for a while, rather than the people or governments at the receiving end of their funding.
Consequently, much of PEPFAR funding went to abstinence programmes and funding was often refused to country proposals for preventative programmes. This was confounded by a focus on treatment over prevention, which to some appeared to be closing the gate after the horse has bolted. There are various theories as to why the focus was on treatment, from: the need to focus on an out-of-control epidemic, where treatment is a form of prevention; to the more conspiratorial position that Congress was beholden to big pharma, who own the patents on much of the drugs used in treatment, with Congress also fighting on another front via the WTO to reduce the space for production of generic alternatives that would compete with big pharma’s prized possessions (more on TRIPS another day). I don’t advocate one of these theories over another, its a very grey, complex area and likely that elements of each can be traced and located.
A further consequence of this focus on treatment over prevention (and there are many) was that PEPFAR held the financial carrot up to low income countries and said “if you want this money you best change your health system to suit our interests”, to which some replied “ok”. That’s “country ownership” and “partnership” the PEPFAR way.
Anyway, long story short, PEPFAR have begun to see the light and their recent review has led them to become more open to prevention programmes (including condom distribution), allocating a greater proportion of funding for such programmes. How this plays out will be interesting to see, as it can contribute to some of the more positive outcomes of PEPFAR activity (eg dispersing money in countries quickly to allow for rapid scale-up of treatment programmes and getting people onto life-saving medication).
Some reaction to Pope’s comments here . . .
And that editorial from The Lancet (copied here as it is brief, but if you register with the Lancet you can also view it directly, along with other interesting articles)
Editorial
The Lancet, Volume 373, Issue 9669, Page 1054, 28 March 2009
Redemption for the Pope?
The Vatican felt the heat from an unprecedented amount of international condemnation last week after Pope Benedict XVI made an outrageous and wildly inaccurate statement about HIV/AIDS. On his first visit to Africa, the Pope told journalists that the continent’s fight against the disease is a problem that “cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms: on the contrary, they increase it”.
The Catholic Church’s ethical opposition to birth control and support of marital fidelity and abstinence in HIV prevention is well known. But, by saying that condoms exacerbate the problem of HIV/AIDS, the Pope has publicly distorted scientific evidence to promote Catholic doctrine on this issue.
The international community was quick to condemn the comment. The governments of Germany, France, and Belgium released statements criticising the Pope’s views. Julio Montaner, president of the International AIDS Society, called the comment “irresponsible and dangerous”. UNAIDS, the UN Population Fund, and WHO released an updated position statement on HIV prevention and condoms, which said that “the male latex condom is the single, most efficient, available technology to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV”. Amidst the fury, even the Vatican tried to alter the pontiff’s wording. On the Holy See’s website, the Vatican’s head of media, Father Federico Lombari, quoted the Pope as having said that there was a “risk that condoms…might increase the problem”.
Whether the Pope’s error was due to ignorance or a deliberate attempt to manipulate science to support Catholic ideology is unclear. But the comment still stands and the Vatican’s attempts to tweak the Pope’s words, further tampering with the truth, is not the way forward. When any influential person, be it a religious or political leader, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record. Anything less from Pope Benedict would be an immense disservice to the public and health advocates, including many thousands of Catholics, who work tirelessly to try and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide.