Pro-Life: What War on AIDS?

In what has come to be a ritual of platitudes and politically correct posturing, World AIDS Day is observed every year, and AIDS programmes are held on numerous occasions during the year. Many seeking to flaunt their celebrity status, and others seeking to gain it, are featured in a media extravaganza, mouthing meaningless nonsense like “spread the message, not the infection.” and telling us that the greatest ally of AIDS is ignorance while the need for AIDS awareness is stressed. The hype and hysteria is lapped up by many who do not know better, and come away feeling good that “something is being done”.

“The fight against AIDS is being fought on a war footing”, we are told. The truth is, you cannot fight a successful war while sleeping with the enemy – and that’s hardly a pun. We hear spokespersons for the “war on AIDS” whose idea of “responsible sex” is the use of condoms, who proclaim to advise their daughters to do anything you want, just don’t get pregnant, and comics whose celebrity status gives them the right to advise promiscuity with caution. Some years ago, a national magazine quoted a film star as saying that a condom is like a credit card, he never goes anywhere without one. I wrote in, pointing out that the principle of a credit card is, “Spend now. Pay later.” The letter was not published. So much for the social responsibility of the media.

Too often, advertisers and media join hands to turn the AIDS issue into a celebration of illicit sex. The condom lobby, which for the most part unashamedly urges potential customers to indulge in extramarital sex, uses the fear of AIDS to sell a lifestyle that is the greatest cause of the spread of AIDS. A music channel that, in its music videos, promotes overtly sexual ideas, words and images, sponsored a “Run for AIDS” (they should have called it “Run from AIDS). On prominently displayed banners, their logo was written with the upward stroke of the letter “V” lengthened and clad in a condom to resemble an erect male organ. Some thought that very funny. But AIDS isn’t funny. And the false promise of “safe sex” with condoms, which have an unacceptably high failure rate even as contraceptives (between 10 and 20 pregnancies per 100 couples, per year) is nothing but a sick joke. If cigarette packs carry a statutory health warning, shouldn’t condom packs be required to display information on the failure rate?

The media is a powerful tool in the hands of those who use it – whether for good or for evil. Even ruthless dictators have ridden to unlimited power on the shoulders of a servile and self-seeking media.

The need to be “acceptable” causes many media people to shy away from a potentially unpopular stand, and even abdicate their duty to think. In this, they mirror the contradictions in society. They decry the consequences of falling moral standards, even while they take an “adult and mature” stand approving the causes. They decry the breakdown in the sacred institutions of marriage and family, even as they defend their right to screen/telecast programmes that deliberately and overtly undermine those institutions. All express outrage at the rape of a woman, but how many will protest against a needlessly explicit rape scene in a movie? How many will, in the privacy of their own homes, switch the channel because it offends their sense of morality?

The bottom line is respect for human dignity. How can we approve, much less patronise, something that demeans another human being? How can we speak of human rights even as, in our own country, we destroy more than 12 million unborn human babies through abortion (and who knows how many newborn girls)? How can we talk of the dignity of women even while we tolerate pornography and other evils in the name of adult freedom of expression?

The media is schizophrenic, but so are many of us. We speak of “integrity.” But what does that word mean? Derived from “integer” – the mathematical term for a whole number, it means an undivided wholeness, a lack of internal contradictions. It means zero tolerance for what is wrong, and the total rejection of double standards. It means that what we proclaim in public must be no different from what we believe in our minds and practice in the privacy of our own homes. If it is wrong to do something, it is equally wrong to present or watch that wrong-doing in the name of “adult entertainment.”

Many argue that there is a difference between desiring something and actually doing it. Legally speaking, perhaps that’s right. But morally speaking, it is not very different. Desire is the first step towards action. To avoid actually doing something wrong, we must recognise that it is wrong and kill the desire.

We can take a lesson from the Ten Commandments. While they explicitly forbid such actions as murder, adultery, theft and lying, the 9th and 10th commandments specifically warn us to kill even the desire – “Thou shalt not covet . . .”

Almost 90 per cent of AIDS cases result from illicit sex. The war on AIDS is doomed to be lost if we talk about “not moralising”, and refuse to recognise that it arises from a moral crisis, and therefore requires a return to a moral lifestyle.

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