Anglican Mainstream

By David van Gend, MercatorNet

Why is it so hard to admit that gay health and life expectancy are far below average?

By David Ould, Stand Firm

With that said, onto the specifics of the debate…

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By Michael Bouldin, AlterNet

By Wendy Wright, Turtle Bay & Beyond

Uganda was the great success story in reducing HIV/AIDS. Now, a member of the generation that benefited worries that Uganda’s “image of reversing the scourge in the early 1990’s has since dissipated.”

Is Uganda losing it via HIV Prevention?

 

I heard someone say at a conference the other day that Uganda was embarrassed at the recent 2012 World AIDS Conference in Washington.

 

Apparently, our image of reversing the scourge in the early 1990’s has since dissipated.

 

We no longer have a President and his wife on a Jeep upcountry telling 15 year olds that they can delay sexual debut until marriage.

 

Instead, we have a bunch of senior six vacists tossing off their blouses at a rooftop city hangout in the middle of the city while boogying to Ragga Dee’s “Am in love with a stranger” .

 

We now have a high school generation loaded with more rubber than character.

 

Parented by television, they have never witnessed a dying AIDS patient in their lifetime, to them, HIV is like the little bug they watched in a sci-fi movie last night. 

by Stefano Gennarini, J.D., LifeSite News

Despite overwhelming medical evidence that AIDS is exponentially growing among homosexuals because of behavioral risks, the widely read medical journal Lancet is telling the medical community that “homophobia is a key driver” of the growing epidemic. And the Lancet is calling for the decriminalization of homosexual behavior and the removal of any stigma and discrimination attached to homosexuality.

By Sharon Slater, Family Watch International

A new report issued by a UN commission established by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon claims that all nations must legalize prostitution as part of any successful effort to deal with the AIDS pandemic. This report, titled “HIV and the Law: Risks, Rights & Health” also calls for the legalization and destigmatization of injection drug use and sexual relations between males—all in the name of AIDS prevention.

Ironically, the report acknowledges that “sex workers” (the euphemism used for prostitutes), intravenous drug users, and “men who have sex with men” have the highest incidence of AIDS, yet the commission still calls upon nations to legalize and destigmatize these risky behaviors.

We could have predicted the recommendations because the commission was stacked with committed “sexual rights” activists. The report simply recycles the same discredited arguments that have been made for some time now by UNAIDS and other UN agencies, which are reflected in the UNAIDS “International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights.” (Click here for our policy brief on the Guidelines and here to see our brief on failed UN HIV/AIDS policies.)

The argument the report uses for legalizing high-risk behaviors is a common argument used by sexual rights activists and goes something like this:

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By Lisa Correnti, C-Fam

The UN Population Fund partnered with sexual and reproductive rights groups this week to push a controversial agenda of risky sexual behavior at a major international AIDS conference in Washington.
 
[...] Johns Hopkins University’s Edward C. Green, former director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, has argued that over-emphasis on condoms rather than behavior is dangerous especially among high-risk populations. “There is a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded ‘Demographic Health Surveys,’ between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates,” Green said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke at Monday’s plenary session promising U.S. commitment to the conference agenda and then deviated from the topic to laud the recent Gates-UK Family Planning summit. “Every woman should be able to decide when and if she wants children whether she is HIV [positive] or not,” Clinton said. Then echoing Melinda Gates, Clinton added, “There should be ‘No Controversy.’”

Experts warn that the Gates plan to inject millions of poor women in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa with contraceptives ignores research linking the injectable Depo Provera and the spread of HIV. Dr. Denise Hunnell estimates the program “may double the transmission rates of HIV.”

The UN estimates that over 34 million people live with HIV, 7,000 contracting it each day. WHO estimates 30 million AIDS-related deaths since 1981 with 1.7 million in 2011 alone.

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by Stefano Gennarini, J.D., Turtle Bay & Beyond

The Lancet has launched a new frontier for homosexual activism with its latest series on the AIDS epidemic among homosexuals, calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality and the combating of homophobia through law, culture and in the provision of health services to MSMs, that is, men who have sex with men.

From Pink News

Almost £8 million is being invested in driving down HIV infections and providing information to improve people’s sexual health, Public Health Minister Anne Milton announced yesterday.

The money will go to the Terrence Higgins Trust and the Family Planning Association over three years.

Latest figures continue to show the largest increases in STIs were seen in men who have sex with men.

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From News24

Washington – HIV/Aids is affecting black gay men in the United States on a scale unseen among any other group in the developed world, said a report issued on Wednesday ahead of the International Aids Conference.

So grave is the crisis that in some US cities, one in two black men who have sex with other men are HIV positive, according to the report from the Black Aids Institute, the only national HIV/Aids think tank focusing on African Americans.

[...]  HIV prevalence among such men is twice as high as among their white counterparts. They are also far less likely to be alive three years after being diagnosed with Aids than white or Latino gays and bisexuals.

What's more, black gay and bisexual men are seven times more likely than non-black counterparts to have undiagnosed HIV.

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by Patrick B Craine, LifeSite News

A Catholic bishop in South Africa is backing Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial assertion that condoms have made the AIDS crisis worse in Africa.

“People, in their minds, they think that condoms prevent the sickness,” says Bishop Xolelo Thaddaeus Kumalo of Eshowe, a small town in Zululand, in an interview with Where God Weeps.

But, he says, “it helps spread it because every young person, even those who are not aware of sexual activity, is taught in the school about this condom in sexual education. They try it and that is why you still have a high rate of people being infected with this AIDS epidemic.”

The HIV infection rate in South Africa is estimated to be as high as 22%.

In March 2009, on his way to Africa for his first papal visit to the continent, Pope Benedict ignited a worldwide controversy when he told reporters that the condom will not solve the AIDS crisis and in fact “aggravates the problems.”

The remark sparked widespread scorn from world leaders, mainstream media, and even some Catholic bishops.

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By Dale O'Leary

By Carolyn Moynihan, MercatorNet

By Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

By Sophie Borland, Mailonline

Foreigners with HIV will be given drugs costing £20,000 a year on the NHS under Government proposals to prevent the spread of the disease.

The treatment will be offered to non-British residents in England, including failed asylum seekers and students on temporary visas.

It is not clear how many patients this will affect or what it could cost the health service, but ministers believe that many foreigners with HIV are not coming forward for treatment as they cannot afford to pay for it.

They claim that every HIV case properly diagnosed and treated will prevent another five people from contracting the disease.

The drugs, called anti-retrovirals, slow down the damage to the immune system, thus preventing patients from developing Aids.

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By Carolyn Moynihan, MercatorNet

By Carolyn Moynihan, MercatorNet

Here’s a question of special relevance to regions where there is a high incidence of HIV/AIDS — in particular, sub-Saharan Africa: Does marriage protect a person against the disease? An editorial published in the official Zimbabwean newspaper, The Herald, this week scoffs at the idea, saying, “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

By John Richardson

From "Life After Death" by Michael Harris

[...] … My peers and I are supposed to be “over” our gayness. It’s unfashionable to have gay-related “issues.” Many of us consider the gay newspaper Xtra passé. Even the gay bars are tired spaces, for the most part, and younger crowds prefer one-off parties at weird hotel bars that aren’t explicitly queer.

I partake in all this, and enjoy it. But the impulse to do away with the ghetto and focus instead on social autonomy is also a flawed, neo-liberal ambition. We like to believe we are masters of our own fate (even as proponents of “free will” have a hard time explaining why poor people consistently produce poor children). Culture matters, actually, and nowhere is this more evident than in HIV test reports. Aboriginals comprise about 4 percent of Canada’s population, for example, but make up 6 to 12 percent of new cases. Race even affects the way people become infected. Aboriginals most often become positive via intravenous drug use; among Latin Americans and Asians, it’s mainly gay sex that leads to infection. Among the black population, heterosexual contact is overwhelmingly the cause. HIV preys on a culture’s fault lines. Like many diseases (tuberculosis in Buenos Aires, say), it is a litmus test for class distinction.

Single gay men in Canada are up to six times more likely than our heterosexual counterparts to kill ourselves. We tend to smoke more, drink more, use more illicit drugs. In a 2003 clinical guide, Dr. Allan Peterkin and Dr. Cathy Risdon estimated that the lifespan of Canadian gay men is between twenty to thirty years less than the average.

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By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman, LifeSite News

The European Parliament, the European Union’s representative body, has passed a resolution urging the use of abortion and contraception to stop the spread of AIDS, while making no mention of abstinence education.

The document, coded “B7-0615/2011,” which was passed December 1, addresses the European Union’s “response to HIV/AIDS in the EU and in neighboring countries,” and lists a number of measures to combat the deadly disease.

According to the document, the European Parliament “calls on the Commission and Council to ensure access to high-quality, comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services, information and supplies,” which should include “equitable and affordable access to contraceptives, including access to emergency contraception; safe and legal abortion, including post-abortion care.”

The document does not mention abstinence or abstinence education, which medical experts say is the most effective way to prevent HIV transmission.

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