I’m not the first to observe that American evangelicals have been taking over the sex agenda. But you have to take your hat off to (Ir)Reverend Ed Young, who challenged his congregation to keep it up for a week. You have to take something off, at any rate. Perhaps the cap on the Viagra bottle?

“I’m going to challenge you to have sex with your spouse for seven straight days,” says Irrev. Ed. Seven straight days of sex with your spouse. It’s not seven days of straight sex with your spouse, so we’re allowed to go beyond vanilla, which is always nice. Nor is it sex for seven days with your straight spouse, so I’m guessing same-sex marrieds are allowed to take the challenge. But it does appear to be seven days without a break. I’m all for lots of sex, but seven straight days? What about those essential post-orgasmic pee breaks? What about a slap-up breakfast or an inter-course glass of wine? I think I’d need both by halfway through day 2.

Maybe the good pastor meant seven days in a row. In the same way that the abstinence fundamentalists probably meant to recommend 101 Fun Things to do INSTEAD of having sex, rather than BESIDES having sex. Or maybe evangelicals really are more adventurous that I thought.

By the way, I was watching Rev Ed strutting his pink stage (styled, it seems, by a Holy Trinity of ghosts: Elvis, Freddie Mercury and Elton John) courtesy of the Midwest Teen Sex Show. If you want to help them raise money to keep producing their fabulous sex videos and are still looking for last-minute christmas presents, the humping bull T-shirt comes in various shapes and sizes. Enough to wear a different one seven days in a row…

Robert Ochai, director of the trailblazing AIDS support organisation TASO, has noticed that some of group’s the 23,000 treatment clients are giving up their HIV drugs because they have been “cured” by faith healers, according to a report in The Monitor. Apparently, faith healing has become big business in Uganda.

“Several Pentecostal churches in the country, more so in Kampala, invite the sick, including those with Aids, for spiritual healing. Some churches promise miracles, sometimes in exchange for their patients’ valuables. The most publicised case is of Ms Frances Adroa who claimed last year that she was tricked by pastors of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God into offering her car to the church. She later sued the pastors after her condition deteriorated and they refused to return her car,” reports Kakaire Kirunda.

Eating in to family finances is bad enough. Deliberately encouraging people to give up life-prolonging therapy is far worse. But the effect on the epidemic as a whole could be catastrophic, too. If a person is on antiretrovirals, it is critical that they stay on them (or, to use the AIDS Inc. jargon, that their “compliance” is high). If they stop taking them for a bit, because they run out, forget, can’t be bothered, feel rotten or whatever, the amount of virus in their blood shoots up. That damages the immune system and makes it more likely that they’ll get sick, it increases the likelihood that the virus will mutate into drug-resistant forms, and it makes it much, much more likely that they’ll pass their infection on if they have unprotected sex.

Partly because of the extraordinary level of support provided by organisations like TASO, compliance among Ugandans on ARVs is very high. Undermining it in the name of God and Mamon is beyond cynical, it is downright wicked. In this regard, the “faith healers” are no better than witch doctors or traditional healers who sell expensive herbal cures for AIDS.

For an insight into the complicated relationship between traditional beliefs, modern medicine and faith, I urge you to read Johnny Steinberg’s book Sizwe’s Test, to be published soon in the UK under the less interesting title Three Letter Plague. He’s writing about South Africa rather than Uganda but he does so with depth of feeling and great humanity. It’s thought-provoking, and a lovely read.

Condoms lead to death, apparently. Since one in 10 adults in Dar is infected with HIV, you might think it more likely that unprotected sex leads to death. But perhaps to the Catholic fundamentalist who put up the posters, passing on a fatal virus is preferable to the sin of using contraception.

At the time, I wrote that “The Condoms = Death campaign … marks a shift in rhetoric from anti-abortion to anti-contraception among a small but vocal core of conservatives in the United States. Unless something is done about it very soon, that shift is going to be imposed on millions of women and men across the globe.”

It now looks like the first victims might be women on the home front. Under new regulations proposed by the US Department of Health and Human Services (pdf), many popular forms of hormonal and indeed mechanical contraception can be re-defined as abortion. And the legislation allows people who work in tax-funded clinics to refuse to provide those contraceptive services if it offends their delicate religious sensibilities. So much for separation of church and state.

Essentially, Conservative Christians, who’ve spent decades perfecting the use of the anti-abortion hot-button, are beginning to conflate contraception with abortion in much the same way as they’ve conflated prostitution with human trafficking. They don’t try to hide it: Human Life International, the Virginia-based Catholic organisation which is responsible for the Tanzanian posters, declares “We exist…to fight the evils of abortion, contraception, sex education and family breakdown”.

If this becomes entrenched in the States, it will certainly get exported around the globe. The AIDS funding legislation before Congress already prohibits the use of HIV prevention money to support contraception for infected women. We’re willing to give a pregnant women expensive antiretrovirals to prevent her passing HIV on to her infant, but we can’t give her cheap contraceptives if she’d rather avoid being pregnant in the first place.

It’s shocking and completely irrational. Though perhaps they’re just following the lead of the World Health Organisation. When I was last on a WHO contract the health plan wouldn’t pay for contraception, but it would pick up the tab for an abortion. Ho hum.

For more details on the US legislation, see Amie Newman and Cristina Page.

Here’s some of what I say: Over three decades of fertility and sexual behaviour surveys have recorded distinct differences in patterns of sexual networking around the world. Broadly, men and women in parts of sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to have a small number of steady partners at any one time; in other regions, people often have a lot more partners over a life time, but usually just one at a time (sex in nets versus sex in strings, I call it). HIV spreads more efficiently through sex in nets, and that in large part explains why two thirds of people with HIV live in Africa.

Those are facts. Not opinion, certainly not an expression of any judgement about the inherent superiority of any behaviour or moral code. But some people have suggested that simply stating those facts plays into the hands of people who believe that sex is bad and more sex is worse, and who use that judgement to light bonfires of hatred upon which whole races get burned. One such person is ZSUZSANNA, of the Faithful World Baptist Church (Doctrinal statement: “We believe that homosexuality is a sin and an abomination which God punishes with the death penalty”.)

“I would link to her blog to prove I am telling the truth, but I won’t because I thought the woman was inappropriate, vulgar, and a psycho.” says ZSUZSANNA of a stranger who had the audacity to conceive a child by in-vitro fertilisation. I feel exactly the same way about ZSUZSANNA, but I will link to her vitriolic blog, so that you can see I’m not making it up. Choice quote:

Maybe instead of handing out condoms like candy, these people should be taught not to live like animals and sleep with everyone and everything that moves. Statistics have proven over and over that distributing condoms RAISES the incidence of STDs. This is due to the fact that people will fornicate more because they feel safe…

Let’s leave aside this good Christian soul’s inability to interpret data (one she shares with a Bush-appointed former Secretary of Education, Bill Bennet.) How many of “these people” has she spoken to? Is she prepared to write off the millions of chuch-goers of Africa as “animals” just because of differences in the way sexual partnerships are structured?

In addressing HIV, I still believe it important to state the facts and address them appropriately. But if anything I say reinforces this kind of blind prejudice, I would be sincerely sorry.

I was alerted to this rant by Lazygal.

Check out “Jesus loves you — and your orgasm”, Salon’s review of Dagmar Herzog’s book “Sex in Crisis”. In the review, Louis Bayard says that Herzog implies that the religious right has hijacked the language of the liberal left, the better to control our sexuality. The rhetoric around sex work, for example:

As recently as 2003, for example, a certain public figure was arguing that voluntary prostitution was “despicable” because it “demeans the value of women” and promotes “the severe degradation and exploitation of women, the literal rape of countless women around the globe.” Was it Andrea Dworkin? Catharine MacKinnon? The correct answer: pro-life Rep. Smith, R-N.J., whose distinctly illiberal purpose was to limit AIDS outreach efforts to prostitutes and sex workers in developing nations.

We’ve seen some of this before. We’ve seen leaders of gay communities play down the association between anal sex with multiple partners and infection (including HIV, LGV and MRSA), so finding themselves in cahoots with “everyone is at risk” profiteers. We’ve seen African leaders adopting distinctly unsecular moral rhetoric rather than talk about sex. But the point is, this is all rhetoric. It is not debate, or conversation, or discussion. It is assertion. Asserting beliefs at one another doesn’t change minds. Kids go on having sex despite having been assaulted with messages telling them not to. Preachers go on employing sex workers despite ranting about the fact that prostitution is not work. Fundamentalists of all stripes go on asserting the virtue of programmes that don’t work, despite people like me constantly asserting the opposite. (Though my assertions at least come with data sets.)

And when I hear assertions like this: “Only those women who have been premaritally abstinent will be truly, deeply, and consistently desired by their husbands in the long years after marriage … Have no sex before marriage and you will have outstanding sex after marriage.” I go on snorting in disbelief. But then in my world, I couldn’t find a large enough sample of still-married virgins-at-marriage to disprove the assertion.

“Homosexual dominated the competition. He started well and pulled out to a comfortable lead by the 40-meter mark. This time, he kept pumping those legs all the way through the finish line, extending his lead. In Saturday’s opening heat, Homosexual pulled way up, way too soon, and nearly was caught by the field, before accelerating again and lunging in for fourth place.”

The pulling up, pumping and lunging is actually the work of Olympic sprinter Tyson Gay. But the “G” word is not acceptable to the American Family Association, so they’ve automated their software to replace it. Or rather it is acceptable, according to AFA news service OneNewsNow’s Fred Jackson. “We don’t object to the word ‘gay,’ except when it refers to people who practice a homosexual lifestyle,” Jackson told Sleuth.

Thanks to Sleuth, Ed Brayton and Don Dickerson for the story.

Fundamentalists are not the only ones who get in trouble when they replace brains with algorithms. Back in the mists of time, I was working the late shift at Reuters during the Golden Globe awards. Someone pressed the button on an alert announcing Best Supporting Actress award to Joan Plowright. Seconds later, she popped up on the screen in her Anglicised incarnation: Joan Ploughright.

Tobias typifies the hypocrisy about prostitution which riddles the United States. He says he only paid Palfrey’s staff for massages, not for sex. And Palfrey says that to her knowledge her staff only provided massages. She said it in court. He didn’t have to. She was convicted of a number of crimes. He wasn’t. She is dead.

Tobias presided over a programme that aimed to end prostitution in the world. (I am not making that up. Check it out in the Box headed “Violence Against Women and HIV/AIDS”: “The Emergency Plan will also support interventions to eradicate prostitution”.) For a round-up of what people whose livelihoods is to be eradicated think of that, see the links to posts about Palfrey’s death on Bound, Not Gagged. The supporters of this policy argue that the willing buyer, willing seller principle which drives most of American life does not apply in the area of sex. They argue that prostitution is not a victimless crime.

This self-serving moralising, this craven hypocrisy about the trading of sex, is the real crime. It has just claimed it latest victim, in the form of Deborah Jeane Palfrey. May she now find peace.

A Crime So Monstrous, a new book by Benjamin Skinner, is adding to the buzz. In an interesting interview with Salon magazine, Skinner is careful to make a distinction between slavery, human trafficking, and the sex trade.

Salon: There are philosophical differences about how to combat slavery. Some people, such as Michael Horowitz (the neocon abolitionist), have focused exclusively on sex trafficking, hoping there will be a “ripple effect” with other forms of slavery such as debt bondage and forced domestic servitude.

Skinner: Nonsense.

I haven’t read Skinner’s book yet, but it looks promising. Of course compared to a lot of the bombast out there, anything which deals with the nuances and complexities of forced labour and human trafficking would look promising. If you’re interested in this and in the New York area, there’s an interesting-looking discussion on the legal rights of sex workers, trafficked and otherwise at the City University of New York on Tuesday.

It is abundantly clear from the debate on Bound, Not Gagged and other sex worker sites that people who sell sex for a living have as much to offer artistically as people in any other profession. More, perhaps, given a sex worker’s position as counselor and confidante to clients who often come with special needs, illusions and fantasies. How did we get to a point where supporting artistic output from competent artists becomes a reason for losing your job?