The manner in which the Catholic church handles the topic of AIDS is quite frankly bizarre, and illustrates the degree of their utter moral bankruptcy. It is highly ironic, not only because they claim to hold the high moral ground, but also because they claim to have an exclusive direct line to God. This of course is a complete delusion, but I need not ponder on that, it is blindly obvious to any critical thinker.
The latest news is that a Vatican cardinal, Cardinal Tarcisio Berton, opened an international conference on AIDS with a speech that strongly defended the church’s two-pronged strategy against the disease – education of consciences and mobilization of Catholic health resources for patients.
What he fails to account for is that they strongly oppose the only known means of preventing AIDS, condoms. This, of course, is no surprise since it is the same Bertone that resisted the very idea that a bishop should be obligated to contact police to denounce a priest who had admitted paedophilia, and also publicly blamed the child sex scandal on homosexual infiltration of the clergy. When it comes to titles that accurately describe him, I much prefer “Clueless Immoral Gobshite” instead of the made up and utterly meaningless term “Cardinal”.
In the days leading up to the conference a Vatican newspaper ran two articles saying condom campaigns were unsuccessful in stopping the AIDS epidemic; they wrote that campaigns promoting condoms provide a false sense of security, and reinforced that use of condoms within marriage “deforms” the act of procreation – ah yes … lying for the sake of propagating religious dogma, but then that is catholic ethics for you in full flight.
The problem here is that these folks claim they wish to help, yet their delusional beliefs completely cripple them. If they truly wished to get serious about preventing new HIV infections then they would need to focus on promoting wider access to condoms and spreading information about how best to use them, but no, religious dogma is more important than lives. In fact, lying about the effectiveness of condoms is also apparently OK.
One raw fact we should all remember here – this is a belief driven policy that has a body count associated with it, and as long as the delusional beliefs are permitted to take precedence over basic human decency, many many more will continue to die.