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A Dead Debate?

The perennial “Pope opposes condoms” fake-controversy can be so tedious that nowadays it has even become boring to say how boring it is. A difference with today’s story, though, is that, aside from the predictable outrage of the media, the French government has publicly attacked the Pope for saying that encouraging and funding condom-use among […]

The perennial “Pope opposes condoms” fake-controversy can be so tedious that nowadays it has even become boring to say how boring it is.

A difference with today’s story, though, is that, aside from the predictable outrage of the media, the French government has publicly attacked the Pope for saying that encouraging and funding condom-use among Africans is ineffective, and even harmful, in the fight against AIDS.

This is almost certainly an attempt by President Sarkozy’s administration to curry favor with French Left-liberals. But it is surely a risky a strategy for any government to attack directly the Pope, especially in a country that retains a small, yet influential Catholic base.

That aside, the good news for the Catholic Church’s supporters is that–even if, inevitably, the Pope’s counterintuitive suggestion enraged the liberal establishment–many editorialists now accept at least part of the Catholic position that the best solution to AIDS in Africa is fundamental behavior change, rather than condoms. This was not necessarily the case five years ago, when Pope John Paul II was regularly accused of being a murderer in the press for teaching abstinence to Africans.

This shift in opinion is partly thanks to the painstaking research of scientists like Helen Epstein, whose informative book, The Invisible Cure, published last year, is a valuable addition to this complicated discussion. Epstein comes at the issue from a liberal, indeed perhaps anti-Vatican, perspective. But her thesis shows the futility of the endless condoms vs Catholics row.

In the book, Epstein argues convincingly that AIDS spreads most furiously in African societies because of the particular behavioral patterns of “sexual concurrency”—not the same as promiscuity—among Africans. These social habits tend to provide the virus with the perfect conditions to spread–far more ideal, say, than the environment created by sexually irresponsible groups, gay and straight, in the West, who can be just as (if not more) promiscuous. It’s very complex stuff, but fundamentally, the problem is societal as well as individual. It cannot be solved simply by secular aid workers bearing condoms.

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