No effective AIDS prevention strategy can ignore the role of condoms – or the role of behavior change that is often related to religion. Both are necessary because human beings are neither angels nor beasts, as Christian theology would attest. People need institutions that oppose the banalization of sexuality, as well as institutions that recognize and accommodate the realities of sexuality and disease.
During a visit to South Africa, I asked a very conservative Christian pastor engaged in an HIV/AIDS ministry how he views the condom issue. “When I’m dealing with 10- and 12-year-old girls,” he answered, “I tell them to respect themselves and delay sex. When I’m dealing with sex workers, I give them condoms, because their lives are at stake.”
The best AIDS prevention programs are idealistic about human potential and realistic about human nature. This seems to be where the pope is heading. Given his unquestioned standing as a theological conservative, perhaps only he could make the trip.
I almost hate to admit it, but this gent actually displays a laudable lack of complete cluelessness about what the Pope actually said, though I wish he’d left off the nonsense about the Vatican floating some sort of pro-contraception “trial balloon”. One concern I have with this piece, among many – I think the Anglican Church erred grievously in supporting contraception; [i]Humanae Vitae[/i] is strikingly prescient in ways that our leadership, shall we say, has not been – is that by and large, promotion of condom use among the general population has been disastrous on multiple levels. Admittedly he stresses condoms mainly for “sex workers” (a term I hope has a short shelf life – there are some things that are better left unsugar-coated), nevertheless, he seems to see no issue with promotion of condom use among the general population. The problem ultimately, I think, is that condom use – since it has to be done right every single time and even then is only effective a certain (admittedly high) percentage of the time – actually amounts to expecting people in the throes of passion to exercise precisely the same level and the same manner of self-control that abstinence does. Since the latter is by far the preferred method of preventing pregnancy – in addition to its all-too-obvious moral and spiritual benefits – well, enough said. It’s interesting (and no doubt slightly off-topic – Mr. Gerson indulges in refreshingly little of this particular bit of claptrap) how condoms seem to have devolved, in the exhortations of thoroughly-modern-millies of the sexual revolution, into a latter-day version of cod liver oil: it may not do much good, but you have to take it precisely because it tastes nasty and besides, we wouldn’t want to be “unrealistic” about human nature now, would we?
#1, I agree with you. The Anglican Church did err grievously on this issue in 1930, and in fact you’d find many of those now heading to Ordinariates have always thought so. And it should really be figuratively speaking shouted from rooftops that Abstinence and Being Faithful are the two vastly preferred approaches to fighting AIDS, over condoms. Maybe that’s what Catholics now have as an added ministry, to keep those two options ever before the eyes and ears of a public with degenerating attitude. There is a coarseness to Protestant culture that comes through in the remarks by Gerson, perhaps due to its tendency to embrace the pragmatic in the circumstances. The teaching of the Catholic Church if followed delivers one from ever needing to taste the ‘cod liver oil’, but it is ever more difficult to encounter that teaching for so many.