thomasquinn 32989 wrote:
So, in summary, you are a complete and total liar.
The lone archbishop who thinks somebody in Europe is lacing condoms and AIDS medication to finish of the African people can't blamed be on broad Catholic policy Thomas. Get real. Even the article, from a Catholic news site, noted "However, Archbishop Francisco Chimoio’s opposition to condoms goes beyond the Church’s teaching on sex and sexuality." There are paranoid, rogue people in every profession and sometimes they end up with a public voice. It's unfortunate but it happens.
It's true however that suspicion about the wisdom and efficacy of condom campaigns in Africa was generally shared by the Catholic hierarchy in the early years of the new millenium. Trujillo's case that condoms could allow HIV to pass through was the first attempt to bring science to an increasingly held belief by the Church that condom campaigns were failing Africa. It was intended to support feelings that the use of condoms to protect against AIDS in Africa was "Russian Roulette....leading people to think they are fully protected" and that the promotion of condoms as the answer to AIDS "is to lead many to their death." Instead, fidelity or abstinence was the answer. It's true the use of science in those early years was somewhat selective and overstated, and outside of the consensus of the day, but it wasn't entirely incorrect. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/3845011.stm.
At the bottom of that 2004 piece were some of the thoughts of the very early scientific and epidemiological proponents of the then radical idea that condoms needed a second look at there was increasing evidence that they were not fulfilling their promise in Africa. One scientific source used by Trujillo and the Church in 2004 was described in 2009 by Harvard AIDS specialist Edward Green this way:
<i>In 2003, Norman Hearst and Sanny Chen of the University of California conducted a condom effectiveness study for the United Nations' AIDS program and found no evidence of condoms working as a primary HIV-prevention measure in Africa. UNAIDS quietly disowned the study. (The authors eventually managed to publish their findings in the quarterly Studies in Family Planning.) Since then, major articles in other peer-reviewed journals such as the Lancet, Science and BMJ have confirmed that condoms have not worked as a primary intervention in the population-wide epidemics of Africa."</i>
It's of course hard to know how that 2004 coverage might have differed if what is known today was known then. Your use of Benedict's quote as the final nail in your coffin of 'moderation' is one more irritating example of having to follow you around and mop up completely unnecessary stupidity. That is the precise quote I used to show that the statement was true, science based and directly and explicitly supported by epidemiology and epidemiologists in 2009. I'm not going to reargue the whole thing because it's all there in my previous post. The somewhat retroactively "well duh" truth is that when 25% and more of the young people in a country are infected with HIV a device with a non insignificant risk of physical and human failure is a terrible primary strategy to fight the spread of AIDS. We now know that an emphasis on condom distribution campaigns almost certainly increased infections in these countries. Edward Green again:
<i>So what has worked in Africa? Strategies that break up these multiple and concurrent sexual networks -- or, in plain language, faithful mutual monogamy or at least reduction in numbers of partners, especially concurrent ones. "Closed" or faithful polygamy can work as well.</i>
Condoms are dead last on everybody's list now. How the African epidemics might have charted a different course if the hard to displace western condom orthodoxies had been more critically looked at in the early 2000's when the Church and others first raised alarms cannot be known. If people were remotely able to wrestle in their rabid hatred for the Catholic Church, in your case apparently to the point of being willing to indirectly continue the outdated and deadly promotion of condoms as the primary solution to AIDS in Africa, it would be interesting to consider the implications of the fact that in being behind the Vatican was actually ahead.
Here are the raft of the 'the Pope was right' stories from 2009, which also catch the Church stance on condoms in countries in which the epidemiological patterns are different.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=pope+right+about+condoms&aq=f&oq=pope+right+about+condoms&aqs=chrome.0.57j59j62l3.4415j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
That anti-catholism is the new anti-semitism of elements of the left has been passionately and painstakingly argued in scholarship and books for some time. In my long experience it is certainly so. Sorry about your modern day anti-semitism Thomas. You should work on that.
