Condom Burnings and Anti-Gay Witch Hunts: How Rick Warren Is Undermining AIDs Prevention in Africa

By Max Blumenthal, The Daily Beast. Posted January 8, 2009.

These Bush officials -- Randall Tobias, the Department of State's Global AIDS coordinator, and Claude Allen, the White House's chief domestic policy adviser -- are closely linked to the Christian Right. Tobias, the so-called global AIDS czar, declared in 2004 that condoms "really have not been very effective," and crusaded against prostitution, until he resigned in 2007 when he was exposed as a regular client of the D.C. Madam's escort service. Allen, once an aide to the late Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., resigned in 2006 after he was arrested for felony thefts from retail stores.

During the early 1990s, when many African leaders denied the AIDS epidemic's existence, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni spoke openly about the importance of safe sex. With the help of local and international nongovernmental organizations, he implemented an ambitious program emphasizing abstinence, monogamous relationships and using condoms as the best ways to prevent the spread of AIDS. He called the program "ABC." By 2003, Uganda's AIDS rate plummeted 10 percent. The government's free distribution of the "C" in ABC -- condoms -- proved central to the program's success, according to Avert, an international AIDS charity.

On New Year's Eve 1999, Janet Museveni, who had become born-again, convened a massive stadium revival in Kampala to dedicate her country to the "lordship" of Jesus Christ. As midnight approached, the first lady summoned a local pastor to the stage to anoint the nation. "We renounce idolatry, witchcraft and Satanism in our land!" he proclaimed.

Two years later, Janet Museveni flew to Washington at the height of a heated congressional debate over PEPFAR. She carried in her hand a prepared message to distribute to Republicans. Abstinence was the golden bullet in her country's fight against AIDS, she assured conservative lawmakers, denying the empirically proven success of her husband's condom-distribution program. Like magic, the Republican-dominated Congress authorized over $200 million for Uganda, but only for the exclusive promotion of abstinence education. Ssempa soon became the "special representative of the first lady's Task Force on AIDS in Uganda," receiving $40,000 from the PEPFAR pot.

Emboldened by U.S. support, Ssempa took his anti-condom crusade to Makerere University in Kampala, where senior residents of a men's dormitory promoted safe sex by greeting incoming freshmen with a giant effigy wearing a condom. According to Epstein, one day after she visited the school, Ssempa stormed onto campus, tore the condom from the effigy, grabbed a box of free condoms and set them ablaze. "I burn these condoms in the name of Jesus!" Ssempa shouted as he prayed over the burning box.

"It was a very controversial time," Epstein told me. "After the Bush administration authorized PEPFAR, a number of the local evangelical preachers began to get excited about this and get involved in AIDS very rapidly. To try to prove his credentials, Ssempa became increasingly active and vociferous in his antipathy towards condoms."

By 2005, billboards promoting condom use disappeared from the streets of Kampala, replaced by billboards promoting virginity. "Until recently, all HIV-related billboards were about condoms. Those of us calling for abstinence and faithfulness need billboards, too," Ssempa told the BBC at the time. A 2005 report by Human Rights Watch documented educational material in Uganda's secondary schools falsely claiming condoms had microscopic pores that could be penetrated by the AIDS virus and noted the sudden nationwide shortage of condoms due to new restrictions imposed on condom imports.

AIDS activists arrived at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006 with disturbing news from Uganda. Due, at least in part, to the chronic condom shortage, HIV infections were on the rise again. The disease rate had spiked to 6.5 percent among rural men and 8.8 percent among women -- a rise of nearly two points in the case of women. "The ‘C' part [of ABC] is now mainly silent," said Ugandan AIDS activist Beatrice Ware. As a result, she said, "the success story is unraveling."

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Max Blumenthal is a Puffin Foundation writing fellow at The Nation Institute in Washington.

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