"Ralph Roughton accuses the pope of genocide because the Holy Father says condoms are not the answer to HIV.First, I didn't focus on the pope saying "condoms are not the answer" but on his saying "condoms actually increase the spread."
"So what would Roughton say about all those public officials and gay activists who demanded we keep the bathhouses open even after AIDS was detected in 1981?
"While condom use does not cause HIV, the promiscuous distribution of condoms has coincided with a precipitous increase in infections. Can't Roughton connect the dots? The Holy Father can."
The pope apparently said both, but unfortunately most people heard the message as "condoms don't work, in fact they make it worse," and this will encourage people who already don't want to use them to abandon the most effective preventive (97%) -- if you have sex with an infected partner.
As to Donohue's comments: Like the pope, he confuses coinciding with causation. The spread of HIV increased because we were in the middle of an epidemic that was skyrocketing before the cause was known and continued upward for a while even after condom use was recognized as an effective preventer. Who knows how much higher it would have gone without condoms? If Donohue took a longer range view of the epidemic, he would see that it declined significantly later on and that more consistent use of condoms was a major factor.
But I find it interesting that he shifted the argument from Africa, where AIDS is largely transmitted in heterosexual activities, to the U.S. gay bathhouses in the 1980s, which puts a moralizing sneer into his argument.
Why? Doesn't the argument for abstinence and monogamy in Africa hold up? And what, pray, does he mean by the "promiscuous distribution of condoms"? Why not "widespread distribution"? Again, a moralizing sneer.
I might return the favor and ask why the Catholic Church didn't get rid of pedophile priests once they knew that they were molesting little boys? Didn't they connect the dots?
Ralph
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