Condoms not answer in AIDS fight, Pope says
Pope Benedict XVI said on his way to Africa on Tuesday that condoms were not the answer in the continent's fight against HIV, his first explicit statement on an issue that has divided even clergy working with AIDS patients.
The Vatican encourages sexual abstinence to fight the spread of the disease.
Have we really tried to make abstinence work? Or do we just say abstinence won't work and move on?
Comments (5)
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unless you live in an advanced country where all of you needs and desires can be sublimated, then use of a condom could certainly be helpful. If you doublt this, then move there and live as the locals do with what is at your (and their) disposal. Then let's talk.
Posted on March 17, 2009 3:08 PM
Unless you live in an advanced country where all of you needs and desires can be sublimated, then use of a condom could certainly be helpful. If you doubt this, then move there and live as the locals do with what is at your (and their) disposal. Then let's talk.
Posted on March 17, 2009 3:10 PM
No one has suggested that condoms are "the answer" to AIDS in Africa or anywhere else. They are a hugely useful and successful means of slowing the spread of this deadly disease in a real world where it spreads long before it can be detected.
Continuing to oppose urging people to use this means to avoid spreading this virus - particularly in a place where high-tech medicine is not exactly flowing like a river - is to continue to sentence thousands, even millions to horrible suffering and early death. Once again, the guys in the gaudy dresses and pointy hats are on the wrong side of the debate.
Posted on March 17, 2009 3:38 PM
It's what usually happens when you put ideology ahead of human welfare; you end up hurting the people you want to help, and helping nobody. It happens with every ideology.
Posted on March 21, 2009 9:48 PM
The Vatican encourages abstinence as a way to slow the spread of AIDS. Yeah, we see how well abstinence works with their own "celibate" clergy. Seems they have a logjam to take out of their own eye before lecturing other people on sexual continence.
Posted on March 21, 2009 9:53 PM