As far as off-topic political axe-grinding goes, jlw509 makes my point for me...

This:

Condom use is encouraged only among "'high risk' groups like prostitutes and truck drivers," while the frequency of HIV transmission within marriage -- and a cultural expectation that men will have extramarital affairs -- is ignored. Goldberg quotes Beatrice Were, founder of the National Community of Women Living With HIV and AIDS: "We are expected to abstain when we are young girls and to be faithful when we are married to men who rape us, who are not necessarily faithful to us, who batter us." (I'm reminded of the study a few months back that found improving women's legal rights and cultural standing may very well be key in successfully fighting AIDS in Africa.)

Has almost nothing to do with this:

Goldberg offers up this needed reality check: "For many toiling in the trenches of the pandemic, though, opinions about PEPFAR are far more ambivalent. It's a moral conundrum: how do you weigh lives saved by treatment against lives lost through policies that sabotage prevention?" If "sabotage" sounds like an overstatement, consider that one-third of HIV prevention funds go to "abstinence-only campaigns, often run by evangelical allies of the administration." Or, that if you actually look at the funds allocated to preventing the sexual transmission of AIDS (versus mother-to-child), two-thirds go to these abstinence programs.

The subject at hand isn't about the evilness of contraception, even about its admitted uselessness in an abusive marriage -- it's about the Bush Administration misspending our country's resources by deciding to give money to religious groups in a religious cause to combat AIDS in Africa.

And about educating women to leave to begin with, I believe the article brought that up already:

(I'm reminded of the study a few months back that found improving women's legal rights and cultural standing may very well be key in successfully fighting AIDS in Africa.)

The only way things can change in these countries is if enough people there want things to change, and if they have the power and/or the will to fight for it. And since we're talking about liberal, secular paradises like Nigeria and Uganda, where you could be jailed for being gay, and where one ethnic group and one religious majority is allowed to hoard all the money and resources at the expense of everyone else, I wouldn't hold my breath -- an African revolution just isn't likely to happen within the next five to ten years. Were that not the case, I wouldn't exist (I'm 23, BTW). What we're doing right now, with the AIDS education and funding, is what we can do without disrespecting these countries' sovereignties like what we're in danger of doing by sending people over to Iran to spread about propaganda about the goodness of liberal democracies, like the Iranian government isn't smart enough to shut these people up, to the detriment of everyone involved, and just make things worse for everybody. And it just sounds like derailing whining coming from you, who seems to have it in for abortion, anyways, so you're not exactly clear-headed about this, or even seemingly concerned about the subject at hand.

Jeez. Do these threads have ANY moderating at all?

All of these "why are we over there helping Africans...?" whines have helped me realize just how flawed the "sure, Iran is bad, but SO IS THE U.S.!!" argument is, too, however intentional or satirical some of you may have been..

I happen to be Nigerian-American -- to be technical, an born-and-bred American of Igbo ethnicity -- so I'm a little annoyed at the folks here claiming that giving money to fight AIDS in Uganda and wherever else in sub-Saharan Africa is some sort of condescending pat on the head from Americans pitying the supposed inherent savageness of Africans. AIDS is a very big problem over there: in quite a few scenarios, it includes poor village women who hold down the fort and care for the babies while their husbands go work (truck-driving, whatever); said husbands who make the money, sleep with whomever (prostitutes) and come back, and who won't wear condoms in the meantime; and then, get surprised when both wife and husband finally agree to get AIDS testing by someone willing to drive them there and tell them that it's free, and then, both wife and husband get the worst surprise ever when they find out they both test positive for HIV. I saw this scenario play out in a HBO documentary once.

Specifically, this one:

http://imdb.com/title/tt0372083/

http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/pandemic/

The wife and husband and their baby are probably dead now. All they had to hope for was that the baby would die first.

Living with AIDS costs money -- and in countries where the drugs to treat it are way beyond the budgets for most hospitals, I would think that the U.S. helping in any way to prevent transmission to begin with would be charitable, not some expression of unwitting or intentional racism.

Unfortunately, however, the Bush administration and the Roman Catholic Church (I guess they're racists, too, for being involved, right? The Africans should help themselves, even when there's no money to do so?) decide that instead of realistic solutions, such as giving men condoms to have sex if they're gonna have it, anyways, they decide to take this as some Christian crusade to spread the word of abstinence. The whole "don't have sex outside of marriage" spiel that's only relevant to so few people who care for such sanctimonious moralizing in the first place, and lack the hypocrisy to actually follow through!

Meanwhile, the women in these marriages are the ones who are pressured not to sleep around -- the men have little to do with it, and when you try to educate them about condom use, anyways, they take it as some insult to their manhood or some implication or accidental relevation of some sort from the wife that she has or will sleep around, too. (I read all that from good ol' Time magazine, before after the 2004 elections, when it went Coulter-crazy with a couple of issues and I felt morally forced to cancel my subscription so I could look at myself in the morning)

So what should one do in that scenario?

Ignore it. Right. Nothing contains AIDS better than pretending that it doesn't exist or that it won't eventually happen to you in some way...

And I wish people in these Salon threads would stop bringing up their little pet poliical peeves like the banning of DDT or the Iraq war or the evils of feminism and stay on the subject at hand. Apparently, the only part of Salon that has any moderation to speak of is Walsh's blog. Good god.