The UN Special Envoy for AIDS has a few things to say about the United States policy, and it’s blistering.

But the US Congress has stipulated that a proportion of the funds must be spent on encouraging abstinence-until-marriage programmes.

“That kind of incipient neo-colonialism is unacceptable.

“We’re saying to Africa: ‘This is how you will respond to the pandemic’ and that’s not appropriate because African governments are eminently capable of deciding what their priorities are and what the response should be.”

“You do not provide money on the condition that they reflect your ideological priorities.”

Top US officials have rejected the criticism, denying it promotes abstinence to the detriment of other HIV prevention strategies, or that it is designed to appease conservative Republicans. (BBC)

Given the Bush Administration’s cozying up to the fundie theocon right on women’s issues, how anyone can say that current US policy isn’t doing just that–providing money on the condition that countries toe the fundamentalist Protestant evangelical line. Let’s just take a closer look at this, shall we?

One of the starkest examples of evangelical influence over U.S. foreign policy is in the arena of HIV/AIDS. Because at the start of his tenure, President Bush was ready to shelve the issue: he had shuttered the White House Office on AIDS; he’d neglected to convene a board of AIDS advisors. It was only after intense evangelical political pressure that he began to take up the issue, ultimately marshalling billions of dollars and making AIDS a cornerstone of what he likes to call his agenda of compassionate conservatism. The Christian right can take tremendous credit for Bush’s global AIDS initiative. But of course their pressure also dictated the direction his initiative took.

In an aggressive rewriting of history, evangelicals had singled out Uganda as a successful example of morality-based AIDS program. They claimed that a message emphasizing abstinence until marriage and monogamy in marriage had reversed climbing HIV infection rates there during the 1990s. The spin was patently false - Uganda’s success leaned heavily on a massive condom education and distribution program that brought condom use from negligible levels up to nearly 50 percent. But by cultivating ties with Uganda’s evangelical first family, the Musevenis, who have attracted massive U.S. aid by playing ball, evangelicals inside and outside the administration have spun out a myth, completely contradicted by scientific data, that promoting abstinence and marriage can prevent HIV. In this model, condom information and access is confined only to narrowly defined “high-risk groups” such as sex workers. In fact studies tell us that people who are taught the abstinence-only message, which bars mention of condoms, do go on to have sex, and the sex they have is more risky, less often protected, and they are far less likely to seek out care for sexually transmitted disease.

This deadly ideology has now been exported, to the tune of $1 billion or more, to countries such as South Africa where more than one in four people have HIV–in other words, where every community is a high-risk group. In a situation like that, marriage itself is an HIV risk factor and monogamy is no protection. And depriving people of condoms and information about how to use them effectively is, frankly, murderous.

I spoke with one AIDS advocate in Uganda recently, who has been active fighting HIV there since long before evangelicals discovered the disease, who says condom shortages are now so acute there, due to U.S. pressure, that some men are now using plastic bags out of desperation.

For many evangelical leaders, this kind of reality check is beside the point, because abstinence is really a back door into evangelism. As Franklin Graham, who has received a multimillion dollar grant to do abstinence education in Uganda, told the Senate a few years ago: “This crisis will be curbed only when the moral teachings of God’s Word permeate African society.” (Esther Kaplan, commongroundcommonsense.org)

Where have we heard this kind of cant before? When the Europeans invaded North and South America, extinguishing indiginous cultures, perhaps? Way back when Europeans were exporting Africans wholesale for cheap labor? Let’s face it, religion is one of the most common props of colonialism. It’s easy to feel superior and ignore the suffering of other folks when you think God’s on your side. The horrific cost in human suffering this attitude has spawned is notable in that it’s ignored by the people who perpetrate this sort of travesty.

Which is the saddest thing of all.