UNDER THE RADAR: AIDS AND ABSTINENCE EDITION.

Once again, the House Foreign Relations Committee is fighting over PEPFAR, President Bush's AIDS relief and prevention bill, which focuses on sub-Saharan Africa. In his State of the Union address, Bush asked Congress to double PEPFAR's funding to $30 billion over the next five years. House Democrats want to up that number to $50 billion, but they also want to remove provisions in the legislation that require a third of the funding to be used on abstinence programs, and make it difficult to do outreach among sex workers -- obviously a key constituency in HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention. Since removing those ideological strangleholds would give comprehensive sexual health care providers (read: those who provide contraception and abortion) access to PEPFAR funds, the Christian right PR machine is framing this as -- you got it -- all about the unborn, not about the living suffering from HIV/AIDS. "The radical rewrite will pour billions into the hands of abortion providers with little or no regard for the pro-life, pro-family cultures of recipient countries," fumes LifeSiteNews. But how about respect for facts? You know, like the fact that people all around the world have pre-marital and extra-martial sex? And the fact that respect for the cultures of African countries is best signaled by pragmatic educational and medical measures that can help people in those nations save themselves and their loved ones from illness and death? And while we're at it, the United States could really use a domestic PEPFAR bill. We have an urban AIDS crisis in this country, with up to 1 out of every 20 people infected in some cities, such as Washington, D.C. --Dana Goldstein