Penguin,
I think the article I posted is useful for this discussion, certainly while we have people calling Benedict an idiot, or worse still, nearly a murderer. While I agree that it alone does not vindicate the Church's teachings, its empirical findings are a reason to consider, in some respect, what the Pope is saying:
The Senior Harvard AIDS Prevention Researcher, Dr. Green is quoted:
he claims that “anyone who worked in family planning knew that if you needed to prevent a pregnancy, say the woman will die, you don’t recommend a condom.”
The accepted wisdom in the scientific community, explained Green, is that condoms lower the HIV infection rate, but after numerous studies, researchers have found the opposite to be true. “We just cannot find an association between more condom use and lower HIV reduction rates” in Africa.
Green asserts that promoting Western “liberal ideology” where, “most Africans are conservative when it comes to sexual behavior,” is quite offensive to them.
...Ugandan officials reacted and developed a program that fit their culture; their main message being “stick to one partner or love faithfully.”However, in 2004, Uganda’s AIDS infection rates began to increase once again, due to an influx of condoms and Western “advice”, Green recalled.
Green also noted that there is an ideology called “harm reduction” that is being pushed by many organizations trying to prevent AIDS. The ideology believes that “you can’t change the underlying behavior, that you can’t get people to be faithful, especially Africans,”
According to Green, the Catholic Church should continue to “do what it is already doing,” avoid “arguing about the diameter of viruses” and cite scientific evidence in connection with scripture and moral theology.
Harvard Researcher agrees with Pope on condoms in Africa
The comments that the Pope made which incited this uproar were thus:
"One cannot overcome the problem with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem," the pope said.
Nor can the AIDS pandemic be confronted only with aid programs, he said.
What the church teaches, he said, is "humanization of sexuality" and sexual responsibility on the one hand, and a willingness to be present with those who are suffering, on the other hand.
While Green does indeed write that condoms have been effective in areas with high concentrations of, say, brothels, [the individual level] they are not so on the population level. But clearly the problem is above and beyond the sex-trade industry. Green seems to be saying that condoms are not, in any sense, a meta-solution and that, in fact, they run the risk of making the problem worse in the context of African values.
In many respects, the Pope's
comments are supported by at least this one prestigious researcher.
Finally, are condoms really analogous to seat belts? Perhaps. But In the context of multiple sex partners, especially in a society in the grip of an epidemic, the driving one is doing is more analogous to street racing. In this case, the problem is not really tackled by building safer cars so that people can continue to be irresponsible with less harmful results.
This, to me, speaks to the Pope's words about 'humanizing' sexuality. Is the human sexual relationship to be given up to the cost/effective analysis of the technological and product oriented world?
