Rick Warren’s Little AIDS Problem

Noted Rumpeteer, Mrs. Polly, has another great post up at Snarkopolitan detailing some backstory on Rick Warren’s reputation as a compassionate champion of AIDS victims and his efforts to fight the disease in Africa.

While Pastor Warren has been active in AIDS programs in Africa, his main focus has been on preventing not AIDS but condom distribution, and persecuting homosexuals through the paranoiac homophobic Ugandan reverend, Martin Ssempa.

The Reverend Martin Ssempa is a thoroughly scary person.  Even scarier is George W. Bush who, with urging from Rick Warren, established the U.S. initiative PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief) to fund AIDS prevention and treatment throughout the world.  The biggest problem with PEPFAR is that, while it has provided significant funding for treatment of AIDS, it has gutted programs intended to prevent AIDS by requiring significant amounts of funds for prevention to be restricted to abstinence only programs, thus resulting in literally millions of people becoming needlessly infected.

In the late 80’s Uganda had initiated a very successful AIDS prevention program referred to as ABC:  Abstinence, Be faithful, Condom use.  Incidences of AIDS in the population dropped dramatically in Uganda during the 90’s from 15% of all adults in 1991 to around 5% in 2001.  However AIDS is now on the rise again.

Many experts have also speculated that Uganda’s shift in prevention policy away from ABC towards US-backed abstinence-only programmes may also be responsible for an increase in risky behaviour, as comprehensive sex education and condom promotion are no longer mainstream.

Pastor Warren’s role in the US policy to drop the “C” from the ABC concept is well documented.  According to Kathryn Joyce at R H Reality Check

Warren’s own AIDS work, together with his wife Kay, began in 2002, ostensibly when Kay read a magazine article about the burgeoning population of AIDS orphans in Africa. That year, Warren led a group of evangelical churches in pushing a reluctant Bush administration to adopt a global AIDS policy, resulting in the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, launched in 2003.
“For all intents and purposes, [PEPFAR] was a good thing to do,” says Jodi Jacobson, consultant for RH Reality Check and the founder and former executive director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), an NGO that promotes sexual and reproductive health and rights. “But with the entry of evangelical churches, in alliance with the Catholic Church, all funding for prevention became very fraught.

A division of aims within the global AIDS movement between those advocating for prevention funding and those working for treatment access helped draw faith-based groups. Though treatment and prevention are complementary in fighting HIV/AIDS, the entry of religious right activists exacerbated this divide between the two priorities. Treatment access advocates sought out partnership with evangelicals hoping for increased funding and attention for expensive treatment programs. But the faith-based solution naturally brought with it skewed policies that limited prevention options and led to what Jacobson calls the “profoundly ineffective” spending of AIDS money: with $20 billion spent on treatment over the past five years, but six new infections for every person treated. “No one doesn’t want people to have access to treatment,” she says. “But my argument is about the tradeoff. You can’t treat your way out of this epidemic.” 

Duh.  Anyone remember that old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”?  Anyone care to guess the difference in cost between five years worth of condoms and five years worth of AIDS treatment drugs?  Not to mention who is more productive – the AIDS free person using prevention or the AIDS stricken person requiring constant medical care?

However once the faith based community lobby got involved, funding for any prevention programs that were not abstinence only became severely restricted.  Further, organizations were restricted from combining HIV prevention programs with family planning programs which emphasized condom use.

Then, in 2008, when PEPFAR was up for reauthorization a particularly brave soul gave his all trying to get the “C” back into the, already proven, ABC model.  As Mrs. Polly tells us:

Anyone who was ever impressed by Tom Lantos, the member of Congress who survived the Holocaust, will stay impressed with him as he fought these vicious fearful lunatics even as he was dying of cancer:

“Troubled by what he was witnessing in Africa, the late Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., led the new Democratic-controlled Congress to reform PEPFAR during a reauthorization process in February 2008. Lantos insisted that Congress lift the abstinence-only earmark imposed by Republicans in 2002 and begin to fund family-planning elements like free condom distribution. His maneuver infuriated Warren, who immediately boarded a plane for Washington to join Christian Right leaders, including born-again former Watergate felon Chuck Colson, for an emergency press conference on the Capitol lawn. In his speech, Warren claimed that Lantos’ bill would spawn an increase in the sex trafficking of young women. The bill died and PEPFAR was reauthorized in its flawed form. (Days later, Lantos died of cancer after serving for 27 years in Congress.)”

Stephen Lewis, the United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, told the New York Times their activism is “resulting in great damage and undoubtedly will cause significant numbers of infections which should never have occurred.”

As for Mrs. P’s expressed hope that Obama’s influence on Warren might persuade him to adopt more enlightened views on effective AIDS prevention and part ways with Ssempa, the following quote by Warren from an article in Christian Today gives me pause:

During a summit press conference, Rick Warren was questioned on whether working alongside groups that oppose Christian moral values on Aids issues might require compromise.
“I don’t believe in compromising biblical convictions,” he responded, according to World Net Daily. “I don’t believe in that at all. If it’s in the Word, then that’s the way it should be done. I do believe in treating people with respect, even people that I disagree with. I think Jesus did that.”

Under Rick Warren’s comfortable teddy bear like exterior lies a hardened zealot.

In a press release from the Center for Health and Gender Equity issued after the 2008 PEPFAR initiative was renewed, Serra Sippel, the executive director stated:

Not only will women and youth continue to bear the brunt of HIV infection as a result of a flawed prevention policy within the new PEPFAR law, their sexual and reproductive health and rights will continue to be compromised.  With the amount of work that so many prevention advocates put into the reauthorization process, it is disheartening to see global AIDS prevention policy continue to emphasize ideology in the guise of political expediency.
It concludes:

In the new year we will look to a newly elected Congress to fix shortcomings in the law, and to the new administration to ensure that U.S. policies promote comprehensive approaches to HIV prevention that advance and protect public health and human rights.

Ditto that Serra.  I think that should be on the front burner of the incoming Congressional and administrative agenda.  This is literally a matter of life and death. Millions of people will die who didn’t need to because of the substitution of ideology for science in the prevention of HIV infection.  And Rick Warren and George W. Bush are to blame for this.

Barack, if you want to push Rick Warren up there on the 20th for a little symbolic inclusiveness,  I think it would be appreciated by everyone who has supported you to make it clear that the association doesn’t go any further than “treating people with respect” as Warren said. 

Posted by marindenver on 01/16/09 at 05:10 PM • Permalink

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