(Photo: Swiped from a Durex condom ad)

President George W Bush has issued a World AIDS Day Proclamation, in which he congratulates himself for his efforts to combat AIDS beyond America’s borders:

As Americans, we believe in the inherent dignity and value of every man, woman, and child. On World AIDS Day, we recommit ourselves to the global challenge of combating the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and to showing our compassion for those affected here at home and around the world.

The fight against HIV/AIDS is a noble and necessary battle. As part of this fight, in 2003 my Administration launched the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Through this program, the United States has partnered with other countries, local communities, and faith-based organizations around the world to support HIV/AIDS treatment, care, and prevention activities. In July 2008, we worked with the Congress to reauthorize this important program for another 5 years.

PEPFAR is the largest international commitment in history by any nation to combat a single disease, and so far the results are promising. PEPFAR has supported care for millions of people around the world. We have also made great strides in the fight against HIV/AIDS through PEPFAR’s commitment to evidence-based prevention interventions, including the ABC approach: abstinence, be faithful, and correct and consistent condom use. PEPFAR is spreading hope around the world by saving lives and showing the good heart of our Nation.

To advance our domestic battle against HIV/AIDS, we must continue to research and develop new methods of treatment and prevention. In 2006, the Congress reauthorized the Ryan White CARE Act. This legislation also focuses on life-saving and life-extending services, increased accountability for funding, and supports HIV testing to prevent the further spread of this disease.

Bush’s PEPFAR dedicated $48 billion dollars to fight AIDS, malaria and TB abroad over the next five years. That’s up from the the $15 billion from the previous five years. But, the good heart of our nation aside, the Bush Administration, to put it bluntly, has neglected AIDS in America as a recent article in the Los Angeles Times reveals:

… Those gains abroad come at the expense of African Americans, according to another report issued Tuesday by the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles.

Seven of the 15 poor countries receiving assistance from the president’s program have fewer infected people than the 500,000 U.S. blacks who are HIV-positive, the report says. The U.S. is spending $402 million this year to combat AIDS among minority groups, a Bush spokesperson said.

“Were Black America a separate country, it would elicit major concern and extensive assistance from the U.S. government,” said Phill Wilson, chief executive of the institute. A free-standing Black America would rank 105th worldwide in life expectancy, he said.

Only four countries outside sub-Saharan Africa have a higher prevalence of HIV infection than the estimated 2% among blacks in the U.S., he added. Blacks account for 1 of 8 Americans but 1 of 2 HIV infections in the country.

(Emphasis: mine)

Those alleged gains also come at the expense of the community of men who fuck men. 50% of new infections and over half the population living with HIV identify as gay, bisexual or transgender. In the harsh light of statistical reality, faith-based, abstinence-only initiatives coupled with the Bush Administration’s blatant attempts to scrub AIDS clean of anything that smacks of homo-sex have failed miserably and at a tremendous cost both in lives and taxpayer’s money.

The expense of Bush’s domestic AID folly remains incalculable because there has never been and there never will be an accounting for Bush’s disastrous faith-based initiatives. The money doled out to religious conservatives is simply gone. As writer Amy Sullivan, in her 2004 article Faith without Works, reported:

Four years later, Bush’s compassionate conservatism has turned out to be neither compassionate nor conservative. The policy of funding the work of faith-based organizations has, in the face of slashed social service budgets, devolved into a small pork-barrel program that offers token grants to the religious constituencies in Karl Rove’s electoral plan for 2004 while making almost no effort to monitor their effectiveness.

According to Sullivan: “The accountability president has chosen not to direct any money toward figuring out whether faith-based approaches really work.”

Quelle surprise !

It’s more than clear, given current HIV statistics, that the Bush Administration’s abstinence-only approach failed and people died as a result of his Christianist base’s Bible-thumping attempt to control, manipulate and deny human sexuality in America. There is not a shred of evidence from the last eight years that the worst president in American history believed in the “inherent dignity and value of every man, woman, and child.” There is abundant, contrary and statistical evidence to prove that President Bush demonstrated no such regard.

PEPFAR may be “spreading hope around the world by saving lives and showing the good heart of our Nation,” but George W Bush has done so at the expense of American citizens living with HIV/AIDS.

Tags: AIDS

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 1:25 am and is filed under History, People, Places, Politics, Religion, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.