If you don’t tell teenagers the facts of life, they’ll make them up. Last year, Florida spent 10.7 million dollars of federal money telling teenagers not to have sex. Nothing else, just “No”. So kids came up with their own stories about how to avoid pregnancy (drink Mountain Dew, smoke dope) and how to prevent [...]
As I zipped through one of London’s less chaotic airports yesterday, my eye was caught by this giant poster behind the cash registers at The Body Shop. In case anyone misses the (very English) pun, lippy is short for lipstick, but also describes someone who is straight-talking, in a rude, counter-culture kind of way. If [...]
Fundamentalist Catholics seem determined to save souls without saving lives. But the elected representatives of the American should not be following suit. Today, the US House of Representatives discusses a bill that will take US$ 50 billion out of taxpayers’ pockets and put it on the table for HIV treatment for people in poor countries. [...]
I’m not easily shocked. Really. But I have to say that the hairs rose on the back on my neck when I saw this: A catholic NGO, calling itself Human Life International, has put up three of these billboards in Tanzania. It’s president, Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, crows about this achievement on a Catholic web [...]
I’m not a regular reader of the Mission News Network, but I couldn’t help snapping to attention when they re-drew the global HIV map: “Parts of the former Soviet Union are starting to see infection rates surpassing those of Africa,” they declared, singling out Ukraine. Last time I looked, around 1.4% of adults in Ukraine [...]
For 15 years, the United States has tried to bar its doors to immigrants with HIV. Like most decisions related to HIV in the States, that one was motivated more by political expediency than by common sense. It seemed to play to fears that if immigrants with HIV came to the States, they’d start spreading [...]
Three years of research, 400 pages of text, a 52-page introduction, and we learn that politicians and other voters are dying from HIV in Africa. The Institute for Democracy in South Africa has recently published a massive tome, The Political Cost of AIDS in Africa which “reveals that the fledgling multi-party democracies in parts of [...]
Anyone convicted in South Dakota of intentionally exposing a sex partner to HIV will have to sign up as a sex offender, according to a bill signed into law today. The AP reports this as though a person has to infect their partner before they become a sex offender, but the law appears to cast [...]
Help me out here. George Bush says abstinence is the only reliable way of avoiding HIV. So you’d think do-it-yourself orgasms would be the order of the day. It took Bush’s home state of Texas a while to get with the programme, but they finally made it okay to masturbate, legalising dildos just in time [...]
Ok, we’re all Spitzered out. I had many reactions to a piece I wrote about the affair(s). Some were baffling — apparently I am anti-Semitic for implying that a man who breaks the very laws he makes might be one sandwich short of a picnic, for instance. Which at least alerted me to the fact [...]
This morning The Guardian published an opinion piece (Sptizer’s True Folly), in which I argued that we should promote laws which differentiate between the exchange of sex for money between consenting adults and the exploitation of children and unwilling workers. Here was one of the responses, from kathyw: Oh, please. These women (and the transgendered [...]
Scott Swensen suggests the following Prostitution Pledge for Politicians. As an American politician I will stop all hypocritical, self-righteous moralizing and judgment of the lives of others. I pledge to support legislation that treats all humans as equals and ensure that foreign assistance dollars intended to stop HIV/AIDS are allocated using the very best public [...]
American taxpayers are ploughing money into ads telling parents to talk to their kids about sex. Or rather, telling parents to talk to their kids about not having sex. It includes such helpful lines as “Tell me to wait to have sex. And don’t worry. I’ll always be your Muffinhead. Your Punkinface. Your Pookie Bear.” [...]
A couple of weeks back, I wondered whether the WHO’s railing against the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was just sour grapes. Last week, The Economist concluded that the wine has indeed turned to vinegar. One of WHO malaria overlord Arata Kochi’s complaints was that the Gates Foundation is becoming a monopoly, squeezing out discussion [...]
After huddling late into the night, US politicians have come up with a compromise. They’ll spend more money on innnocent victims of AIDS, but none to protect those wicked people who sell sex for a living. The US congress house of representatives House Committee on Foreign Affairs agreed to spend an astonishing US$ 50 billion [...]
Finally, a reporter in Ghana put George Bush on the spot about earmarking over a billion dollars for abstinence-only programmes which Bush’s own scientific advisors say don’t work (recent thoughtful comment here). Here’s what Bush said: “I monitor the results,” he said. “And if it looks like it’s not working, then we’ll change. But thus [...]
A week ago, the President of William and Mary college Gene Nichols lost his job. The last straw in a haystack of sins: he supported a show of art by sex workers on campus. This drew outrage from all the usual suspects, and they have been gloating at his dismissal. Organisers and studentsraised their voices [...]
A week ago, the outgoing executive director of the US’s National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Matt Foreman made a great speech in which he called for proper equality for all Americans, regardless of who they sleep with. He also said this: “Today, right now, more than 45 percent of African-American gay and bi men [...]
From the ever-helpful Kaiser Family Foundation comes a very useful summary of where each of the US presidential candidates stands on HIV issues. The summaries for Obama and Clinton are so similar that I ran a “compare docs” on them. Besides substituting names and genders (he/she), the only real differences are: Obama supports “comprehensive sex [...]
