“A tiny group of Republican senators continues to block a vote on an important bill to increase American spending on AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis around the world” i.e. PEPFAR.

Republicans opposing the re-authorisation of PEPFAR have done so on different grounds. A recurring argument being the cost of the President’s plan which, lest we forget represents less than 1.5% of the cost of the Iraq war. Another argument is the elimination of the statutory ban on admitting people infected with the HIV virus into the US, putting the country on a par with Iraq (where the US is fighting an expensive war on terrorism), Colombia (a main producer of the drugs that contribute to fuelling the HIV epidemic) and Sudan. Interestingly a record of terrorism, tax evasion, money laundering or child smuggling are the other reasons preventing admission in the US.

Meanwhile, Geeta Rao Gupta President of the International Center for Research on Women in Washington corrected Rev. Sam Ruteikara’s assertion that Women in marriage would be less at risk from HIV infection than… wanton western women?

Indeed, as recent research shows, more and more married women or women in what is thought or seen as a stable, caring and loving relationship are being infected by their partner. This is true both in Africa and in some South Asian countries such as Thailand and Myanmar.

Now, think about how this tiny 1.5% of a colossal war budget could contribute to reduce the risk married women incur just for being married? And not just by empowering women, which is rather useless without dis-empowering men, but by challenging “common nonsense”

For example in Myanmar where “every sex relationship is up to the man,” said Mie Mie, a 30 years old Myanmarese health educator working with migrant workers in Thailand. “So a woman keeps feeling that she cannot openly ask a partner, ‘please use a condom’, or else he will look down on her.”

“[Women] think this [a condom] is very dirty – used by criminals or very sexually active people,” said Mie Mie. “So they think, ‘this is not for us’.”

Men are hardly better, believing that their future wife are virgins and therefore clean, or that their girlfriends are not like the girls with whom they have sex with in brothel, more often with condom than without.

Or US Republicans and reverends of all kinds who believe that abstinence until mariage will save the world from HIV (what happens after is another story).

Fighting “common nonsense” on Capitol Hill and everywhere else, a new challenge for the coming years!

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