SANGRAM has long worked constructively with sex workers, to the fury of Congressman Mark Souder who stomped on USAID until they shut down funding for SANGRAM. In a letter to USAID as bombastic, self-righteous and threatening as any I have seen, Souder pontificated about the Bush administration’s record in promoting family values and women’s rights.

“There is a tragic irony in the fact that this administration seeks to elevate women in the United States to some of the most important positions in the country…; yet, USAID has funded groups outside the United States that promote the ultimate degradation of women.”

Souder might know something about the degradation of women. Six weeks ago he resigned as congressman after 15 years, admitting to having an affair with a staffer. He started off on script, apologising for the pain he had caused his supporters. But then, with breathtaking arrogance, he stuck up for his own hypocrisy, saying “The ideas we advocate are still just and right.” I’m sure his wife agrees.

Here’s the pompous windbag being fake-interviewed by his girlfriend about the importance of abstinence-only education programmes.

Of course abstinence-only programmes are only meant to work until people get married. Since both Mark Souder and his squeeze Tracy Jackson are married, they hardly count as failures of morality-based sex ed, do they?

(Thanks to Paddy Woodburn for pointing out the Seshu profile and setting me off wondering whatever happened to that windbag Souder…)

Oh, please. These women (and the transgendered men you mention) don’t take home those huge fees. They give a big share – sometimes a ridiculously large share- to their pimp or madam. Often they work as whores because they don’t have qualifications to do any other kind of work – indeed, they get fired from jobs they attempt in the business world because they have disorders, psychological or physical, that prevent them from staying at any routine.

In my annoyance, I called “kathyw” “maryk” in my response. I appeal to those with cooler heads to share your thoughts with kathyw, either on this site or at The Guardian.

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 health strategies, based on real evidence, and targeted to those most vulnerable. When I access the services of a sex worker, call girl, escort or madame, I will always use protection and make sure s/he has access to adequate health care. I will stop dragging my innocent spouse in front of television cameras to support me in a moment of self-inflicted hypocrisy.

Read Scott’s whole post here.

So New York’s Democrat governor Elliot Spitzer admits to having been a naughty boy. He wanted to have sex with someone who wasn’t his wife, and pay for it. Tut tut. Paroxysms of delight from his enemies at The Wall Street Journal and comment about Spitzer’s staying power and other analysis many other places besides. Even the tech nerds want in on the gloating.

I don’t give a toss if politicians want to buy sex as long as the treat the person who wants to sell it decently and pay them well (which Spitzer was apparently more than willing to do). Many other people feel the same. The problem comes not with the behaviour but with the hypocrisy. Spitzer has in the past ridden around on his white charger, puffed up with self-righteousness, telling people what a great job he has done of busting prostitution rings. My sentiments were nicely put by Vincent Romano, lawyer for Frank Farella, who has mouldered in jail since Spitzer bust his Staten Island sex work ring. “My client feels that people who live in a glass mansion in Albany should not throw stones,” Romano was quoted as saying.

While Democratic Assemblyman John McEneny is quoted by Hot Air as saying:

“I don’t think anyone remembers anything like this. The fact that the governor has a reputation as a reformer and there is a certain assumption as attorney general that you’re Caesar’s wife [above suspicion]. It’s a different element than if you were an accountant.”…

Gosh, Mr. McEneny has a short memory. Randall Tobias ran USAID and before that PEPFAR (the US effort against AIDS globally). The Bush appointee championed the Loyalty Oath (which some call The Pledge), an anti sex work provision that handcuffed PEPFAR money to organisations that oppose prostitution. Then oooops! he turned up in the address book of Deborah Palfrey, aka the DC Madam. She spun a gossamer web around his self-righteous hypocisy, until there was no escape and Tobias resigned.

For some really interesting comment on Spitzer’s hypocrisy and the surrounding hoopla, check out some of the sex worker blogs — there’s a good summary on Bound, Not Gagged. I especially liked Waking Vixen’s account of how the media are sticking their snouts into the affair:

And while I am not ashamed that I was a sex worker, and I know sound bites are short and cannot be anywhere near as complicated as my shit it, I don’t want to be MSNBC’s whore on television. It does nothing for me personally and nothing for the movement I’m part of for me to be boiled down to the essence of “will fuck for cash. here’s how.”

(Read more here)

Another thing to be upset about: as Lee Rudolph has already pointed out, it seems that Spitzer may have done “things that, like, you might not think were safe”. And we allow this man to preside over the educational policies of New York’s schools?

The US congress house of representatives House Committee on Foreign Affairs agreed to spend an astonishing US$ 50 billion of US taxpayers’ money on overseas HIV/AIDS treatment over the next five years. (US President George Bush had only asked for US$ 30 billion.) Here’s what acting chairman Howard Berman had to say:

Twenty million innocent men, women and children, we must remember, have perished from HIV/AIDS – 20 million. Forty million around the globe are HIV-positive. Each and every day, another 6000 people become infected with HIV. We have a moral imperative to act, and act decisively…In response to the desperate need for lifesaving medicine and new health care workers in nations hit hard by HIV/AIDS, the bill before us authorizes $50 billion over five years.

(my emphasis)

Care providers are whingeing that the bill will undermine treatment because a 55% minimum for spending on treatment has been dropped, but that doesn’t seem likely. Spending money on medicine is easy and popular both at home and abroad. So I’ll bet most of the money will still be spent on (US-made medicines) and their delivery. Happily, the rule that has so far shovelled over a billion dollars into the black hole of abstinence-only programmes has been dropped. But since our concern is for the innocent, the anti-prostitution loyalty oath stays, despite the best efforts of Bound, Not Gagged and others. This compels organisations who accept any one of the 50 billion dollars on offer to refuse to recognise sex work, thus making it extremely difficult to work effectively with those (wicked, naturally) people who sell and buy sex, even with money from other sources. Some commentators suggest that the Democrats didn’t even bother to fight this one in the compromise bill. If that’s true, shame on them.

Another anomaly: no PEPFAR money can be used to provide contraceptives. US taxpayers are committed under this bill to help infected women avoid passing HIV on to their infants. They’re committed to pay for expensive antiretroviral treatment for the kids if the prevention programmes fail. They’re committed to supporting orphans left behind once those infected women die of AIDS. But they can’t help HIV positive women avoid getting pregnant in the first place. Go figure.

Needle exchange update:The use of PEPFAR money to support sterile needle programmes for drug injectors was not mentioned in any of the official reporting on the compromise bill. The earlier Democrat version of the bill (pdf full text here) appeared to leave the door open for funding needle exchange, which is vital to countries such as Vietnam, by talking vaguely about “evidence-based prevention”. I haven’t been able to get hold of the full text of the compromise bill, so don’t know whether this door to common sense and fewer infections has also been closed.