I had thought to begin my post with a joke, but this is far too serious. 40 million people worldwide are infected with the virus that causes AIDS. That's more than the population of California. It's a terrifying number and a terrifying reality that the number keeps rising. Once again, as in so many other areas, the Bush Administration's dogmatic evangelical approach is killing people. Someone once said that George Bush and Co., have been bad not only for America, but bad for the planet. How on earth are we going to be able to stand another 3 years of this? Thank God people are waking up in this country, and the president's approval ratings are such that he won't be able to get anything substantive done. Fortunately, the EU, having had a much longer history than we have, has turned aside Bush's simplistic "just say no to sex" message.

People shouldn't die for having sex. It's these idiot Jesus freaks that are turning the pleasures of sex into an act punishable by death, which of course they call, "God's Judgement". Nor is it lost on me that many of these people who are infected are black and poor.

Curious, how amongst all this talk about "God's Grand Plan for Israel", Africa is never even mentioned. No plan for them. Other than to be "saved". Let them die otherwise. They're only savages anyway, right?

This is depravity, my friends. If this isn't depravity, I don't know what is.

The europeans are ahead of us, once again, on the

the best way to deal with the aids pandemic. The back

-ward thinking Bush policy is just as harmful and bad

-ly thought out as the rest of the current administra

-tions policies. If americans remain as disinformed a

-bout the effects of our current policies as we are a

-ppear to be at present we are in for a policy fail-

ure so costly to the world as to be nearly unimagin-

able.

Nothing short of a complete reversal of the cur-

rent aids policies is reasonable. Abstinance only can

only fail because human sexuality is hardwired in the

human beings. No amount of wishful thinking will have

any effect on human behavior.

We will make no progress against this disease or any other problem that besets us until we base our ac

tions on the realities of our situation and use to re

-ason to overcome them.

I'm not prone to overemphasizing the differences between 'American' and 'European' thought. However, one thing that is evident to me is that the people running the United States continue to see HIV as the wages of sin, as surely as they did when it was called 'gay cancer'; they view AIDS as a problem of people too promiscuous to be helped. It is quite convenient to their worldview that a disease has come along that makes sex an incredibly dangerous prospect, especially in underprivileged parts of the world - is it any surprise that many of them openly proclaim that it is heaven-sent? This perspective has already proven disastrous.