The Lancet, the Pope and condoms

A supposedly objective Lancet article, which is really an editor's press release (so read "opinion", not "science"), criticises the Pope on condoms. Yet, beyond the liberal dogma on condoms and AIDS prevention, we find that scientific support for the Pope's warning against reliance on condoms.

An article on mercator.net concludes that multiple partnerships are the main reason for the spread of AIDS in Africa. The view that condoms are the answer is attacked by Harvard AIDS prevention expert, Dr Edward C. Green; also by James Shelton, who in a brief article references by case studies and published by the Lancet (you need to register - for free), exposes various myths about HIV infection, including the one that condoms help in generalised epidemics such as Africa (they help with sex workers in some circumstances), that poverty and discrimination are factors or that sexual behaviour does not change. He identifies concurrent partnerships as the main driver. The Mercator.net article also cites a book by Helen Epstein,which notes that infection is spreading despite increased condom use. In an article on Dr. Green's home page at Harvard, behaviour changes are more effective than medical-technical ones. He cites a previous study to support this.

The mantra that condoms are the answer is symptomatic of the fact that liberals like technical solutions such as condoms rather than moral solutions, such as behaviour change. The condoms controversy in Africa is a proxy-battle for the sex education/sexual liberation battle going on still in the West. Just as liberal sex education is failing to stop family breakdown, unwanted pregnancies and abortions in Europe and America, so over-reliance on condoms is failing to protect Africans from Aids. Yet liberals and Westerners stick to their sanctimonious bullying of dissenters in spite of the failure of their own dogmatic solutions. The views of the Catholic church correspond much more to the evidence. Isn't that what Science is supposed to be based on: evidence, not liberal prejudice?

Condoms work for prostitutes, I'm sure. They were first used as part of Government policy by the British in World War I to fight venereal disease on the Western Front. There is no relationship of intimacy between a prostitute and client and it as forms of sexual activity go, it is a clinical business. To use this as a template for sex in marriage or sex between inexperienced teenagers, or most other scenarios, is very misguided. It assumes that married people do not want to have children, it ignores the effect of spontaneity or inexperience. It ignores the various social pressures which operate in the real world.

If you created a controlled laboratory experiment with two equally experienced couples, and asked one pair to use condoms and the other not to do so, you would no doubt find that condoms "work" to protect the users against conception or whatever disease you are fighting. To pretend that such ideal conditions exist in the real world is naive in the extreme. Yet this is received wisdom in enlightened circles.