Let's all recite our ABC's now....

In a N.Y. Times story on a House bill, sponsored by Rep. Henry J. Hyde, R-Illinois, that would triple American global AIDS spending to $15 billion over the next 5 years, sending money to prevention and treatment programs in 12 African nations, Haiti and Guyana, the reporter makes it sound like President Bush has uncharacteristically put saving the lives of AIDS sufferers ahead of religious dogma.

WASHINGTON, April 29 — In rare defiance of the social conservatives within his own party, President Bush today urged Congress to fight AIDS internationally with a $15 billion plan that advocates condom use and in effect permits money to go to groups that promote abortion.

Read between the lines, though, and it becomes clear Bush hasn't had a sudden change of heart.

...he [Bush] was careful to make one of his central arguments in the biblical language of Christian conservatives, many of whom have taken on fighting AIDS as a moral cause.

"When we see a plague leaving graves and orphans across a continent, we must act," Mr. Bush said. "When we see the wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not — America will not — pass to the other side of the road."

The president still strongly supports the conservatives' position that abstinence is the only cure for AIDS. He has not backed down from federal government policy, in effect since Reagan's presidency, that prevents U.S. AIDS money from going to international groups that promote abortion. In fact, Congressional conservatives plan to amendment the Hyde bill to set aside a third of the money for abstinence programs and to exempt religious groups from having to hand out condoms.

Here's the heart of the Conservative's AIDS prevention plan, modeled on Uganda's "A.B.C. Campaign," and endorsed in the Hyde bill:

...First, abstain. If you can't abstain, be faithful. And if you can't be faithful, use a condom.

Sounds more like catechism than an endorsement of what the mainstream medical establishment has concluded is the most effective means of preventing the spread of AIDS: responsible condom use.

So, why did the reporter open with such a deceptively upbeat lead? Maybe the answer lies in the article's final paragraph:

Congressional aides who have visited humanitarian groups in Africa said today that the amendments — and the administration's commitment to make sure that AIDS money does not mingle with money for family planning — had little to do with how the groups actually operated. They acknowledged that the last-minute haggling was entirely driven by American domestic politics.

While I firmly believe in the final sentence, I'd hate to put my faith--and the lives of potential AIDS sufferers--in the hands of "Congressional aides." We've seen this administration's track record on truth-telling regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

As a reporter, I interviewed AIDS workers from Africa in the early 1990's. One person told me of a Catholic priest, in a remote parish--I can't remember the country--who was counseling his parishioners to destroy condoms because it was a sin to use them.

At the time, health worker after health worker from Africa was telling me how they had solid AIDS education and prevention programs in place, the local population was receptive to the message of condom-use, but there were no condoms. They were too expensive and beyond the reach of poverty-stricken African health budgets.

How many people died of AIDS on account of the priest who made piles of hard-to-get condoms and burned them?

Conservative in Congress, preaching abstinence, opposing condom distribution and de-funding abortion, have blood on their hands.