AIDS: The Difficulty Is The Pope

These of you who shell out interest to the journal Science probably already know that they place an image — just a entire body shot — of transgender females on the cover, to highlight a unique area on AIDS.

Here’s the offending image:

There is a nice summary of the controversy right here. Separately from the concerns of the male gaze and transgender rights, I want to stage out something else: most of the problems in combating AIDS have been due to males in power: Ronald Reagan, the final three Popes, and various other people. If you want to highlight the true challenges in defeating AIDS, they’re your cover image they are the ones who manufactured policies that created it harder for vulnerable populations to get the a single point we know protects towards AIDS: condoms. A cover shot of headless transgender ladies is titillation that doesn’t strike at the actual dilemma: policy.

With no producing condoms available, with out educating people about their protective possibilities, we exacerbate a dilemma the place we previously have a answer in hand. In that sense, the largest obstacle to AIDS is none other than the Catholic Church.

In Could 2005, one particular of the very first items that Pope Benedict XVI deigned to inform us was that the standard teaching of the Church is the only way to safeguard against HIV. This is madness we know condoms defend men and women. It is not anti-science — it is anti-fact. And ahead of you stage out that we have a new Pope now, let me just display you that we’ve received a lot more of the identical coming from celibate males who do not actually be concerned about attainable sexual assaults, dumb teenage sexuality, or little one marriages. Kissing the feet of AIDS sufferers is not the very same as guarding the vulnerable, anything Francis has abjectly failed at.

It is also worth reminding the planet about Ronald Reagan’s toxic legacy: I wouldn’t mind generating him the poster-boy for the epidemic, provided how little he did to stop it. 1000′s, if not millions, of deaths can be laid directly at his feet.

If you want to change AIDS policy, make the encounter of AIDS issues the policy-makers. Transgender prostitutes are frequently not in the same positions of electrical power to make choices that will impact hundreds of thousands of men and women. Target the actual sinners: the ones who make the decisions that harm the vulnerable.

*Full disclosure: I am Catholic. Despite the fact that if the Pope decides to excommunicate me, I do not feel I’ll mind it as well much sometimes that’s the value you pay out for morality and compassion.

AIDS: The Difficulty Is The Pope