The Anti-Sam Brownback Blog

I was slogging through the rotting morass that is the conservative blogosphere to catch up on Brownback’s comments at a republican Senate blogging faux press conference. One of his remarks in particular stood out in the context of Brownback’s focus and supposed compassion for Africa. One conservative blogger wrote:

This campaign is part of a broader Republican effort, Brownback says, for which the Republicans in general and the administration in particular have not received fair credit. These humanitarian initiatives include President Bush’s funding of programs to fight AIDS in Africa… Brownback seems to be one of the relatively few social conservatives who has backed his rhetoric with actual work, having visited many of the world’s genuine disaster areas in the last several years.

AIDS. A terrible disease that has orphaned 12 million children and caused immense suffering. For Brownback even to utter the word AIDS is an affront to those who are working to reduce the infection rates. As Foreign Affairs reports:

The involvement of conservative groups in shaping AIDS policy has been most problematic in the area of general AIDS-prevention strategies, where their distinct sexual mores have led them to dissent from what most others consider medical best practice. For example, since condoms, if used properly and consistently, are at least 90 percent effective in preventing AIDS transmission, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has quietly provided millions of them annually to AIDS-stricken countries. Now that religious conservatives have taken up the AIDS cause, however, such programs have come under attack. Thus the Family Research Council has insisted that the Bush administration’s AIDS plan not become “an airlift for condoms,” while conservative religious groups convened by Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kans.) have taken aim at various prevention programs that the plan had considered funding.

By the time legislation implementing the president’s vision… was completed, conservatives in the House had succeeded in redirecting one-third of its AIDS-prevention funding toward programs urging abstinence before marriage. The conservatives are inspired by Uganda’s “ABC” (Abstinence, Be Faithful, and Use Condoms) program, which has helped lower prevalence dramatically, and are particular fans of its A and B components, which, if faithfully adopted, might offer nearly total AIDS protection…

Unfortunately, however, scientific evaluation and medical surveillance paint a different picture. Studies of Ugandan AIDS prevalence that try to assess the relative contributions of abstinence, multiple-partner reduction, and condom use in lowering infection rates have found that abstinence actually made the smallest contribution, while condoms and partner reduction had the largest impact. David Serwadda, a Ugandan physician who chairs the Global HIV Prevention Working Group, has stated, “As a physician who has been involved in Uganda’s response to AIDS for 20 years, I fear that one small part of what led to Uganda’s success — promoting sexual abstinence — is being overemphasized in policy debates.”

Senator Sam Brownback is the worst kind of religious opportunist. He is willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of people in order to advance his scientifically wrong religious ideology. This man should not only not be President, but should be run out of the Senate. To be fair, if Brownback wants to come out and advocate for more condom education in Africa, then I will be happy to take back my words. But he won’t take his words back, because he is beholden to Dobson and the other bigoted unscientific snake oil peddlers.