Forget About Rev. Wright, Check Out the Wingnuts Who Control HIV/AIDS Funding

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 8:58 AM on March 26, 2008.

You know, I had a weary response semi-scripted in my head to those people making a fuss over Obama’s old minister’s belief in conspiracy theories about where HIV came from, a response that would both be understanding of why people fall for conspiracy theories while still maintaining that the truth is the most important thing, and conspiracy theories need to be pushed back against. With a soupcon of explaining why the underlying themes of conspiracy theories about the medical profession that proliferate in the black community are understandable, considering the circumstances. But luckily, wiser heads than me have tackled this problem, so I recommend reading them instead on this issue.

But what is interesting to me is how disingenuous some of the attacks against Rev. Wright are when it comes to actual concern for stopping the spread of HIV.* While not downplaying the role that HIV crankery plays in the spread of the disease (as Kevin notes, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has dismantled the infrastructure to respond to the disease in the wake of believing said crankery, but for racists eager to embrace this, it’s worth noting that Mbeki did so over backed by white advisors and over the objections of black officials), I’m going to say the larger problem here and everywhere around the world is lack of access to protection and lack of education about how to protect yourself from contracting or passing HIV.

As a demonstration of what utter, irresponsible bullshit is going on, I present you the figure of Michael Gerson. Gerson is very concerned about HIV conspiracy theories.

This accusation does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an “occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy.” It makes Wright a dangerous man. He has casually accused America of one of the most monstrous crimes in history, perpetrated by a conspiracy of medical Mengeles. If Wright believes what he said, he should urge the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he views as guilty of unspeakable evil. If I believed Wright were correct, I would join him in that cause.

But Wright’s accusation is batty, reflecting a sputtering, incoherent hatred for America. And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.

And Gerson should know about crankery and battiness on the issue of sexual health, because he’s one of the nation’s leading cranks who is eagerly spreading wack-a-doodle theories that are getting people killed unnecessarily.

Gerson has been a huge player in trying to make sure that AIDS relief money sent to Africa is not used to do anything crazy like prevent the transmission of HIV. He pushes abstinence-only here and abroad. After Democrats managed to push through a much weaker PEPFAR bill than they should have, he ran to the WaPo to whine some more about how all the world needs is to start yelling louder at people to keep it in their pants, as if millenia of pushing that message has worked (or as if it were fair to deprive people of sexual expression when there’s a way to do so that’s relatively safe).

Meanwhile, statistics are being bandied around showing what a dismal failure abstinence-only is in the U.S. But statistics only tell part of the story, which is why I recommend reading Pamela Merritt’s article about her experiences as a health educator, dealing with kids who are getting real sex education when it’s too late to avert all the consequences. Pamela went in to teach budgeting and household skills to pregnant teenagers, and discovered that what they really needed, on top of these skills, was some real sex education.

I’ll never forget a fifteen year old mother-to-be telling me that she had thought drinking a certain caffeinated soda following unprotected sex would prevent pregnancy and I’ll never forget her shy embarrassment when confessing that she still wasn’t sure how her pregnancy happened. Through my work I have met young women who didn’t know why they menstruated, thought they could tell by looking if a partner had AIDS and more than one who thought soaking in a bleach bath would prevent pregnancy or even HIV transmission.

Through my teaching, the disconnect between the policy debate over abstinence-only programs and the reality of young women’s lives has been revealed. On one side, proponents of abstinence-only programs claim that they are working, while on the other side, the teen STI infection rate in St. Louis city is the highest in the nation. On the front lines healthcare providers and volunteers like me meet young women who learn prevention post-infection, who explore contraceptive options after a pregnancy and who are growing up in a culture where sophisticated media outlets sell sex as power and speculate over baby bumps -- yet sex education can now be summed up by Just Say No.

One of the diseases that’s on the rise is HIV, putting the concerns about the disease claimed by abstinence-only proponents like Gerson into sharp question.

We’re lucky in the U.S., because our HIV transmission rate is really low compared to the nations targeted by PEPFAR dollars, so the number of people that are going to die because they forgo condoms, having heard from some abstinence-only “educator” that condoms don’t work. But replacing actual barrier methods with pats on the back and admonishments to women to tell their husbands to quit cheating on them could be exponentially more deadly in African nations. Gerson should be ashamed of himself for pretending he’s on the high road, when he’s pushing a sort of woo that’s likelier to have far uglier consequences than anything Rev. Wright was saying.

*As a side note, the use of proxies to attack a candidate are growing increasingly bizarre. I doubt a single soul belaboring “concerns” about Wright’s beliefs on this issue thinks that Obama shares them, so really, it’s just more lies and bullshit.

Tagged as: obama, hiv, hiv/aids, reproductive justice, wright

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon.