Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has said that condom use in his country isn't the solution to the AIDs epidemic and called for sexual abstinence and fidelity. You might be tempted to think Museveni has a insular, narrow-minded attitude, but you would be wrong.
Uganda has seen the biggest decline of HIV infection in the world since the early 1990s. Nationally the prevalence dropped from 12 percent to 4 percent and in the capital city, Kampala, the rate dropped from 29 percent a decade ago to 8 percent today.
Personal responsibility is the key to Uganda's success. The ABC approach is used there. Abstinence and fidelity are the two major factors in the ABC method and condom use is the last, and least important choice.
Abstinence is preached as the best single way to avoid HIV/AIDs followed by fidelity to one's partner. Only if a person can't remain abstinent or faithful is condom use encouraged. Museveni calls condom use a stop gap, improvised measure and calls for relationships based on love and trust.
Botswana has a high level of condom use and yet at the same time has a high level of HIV/AIDs infections. Anyone looking at the data without bias would have to admit that condom use, by itself, doesn't work, yet groups like Planned Parenthood treat condoms as the ultimate solution.
Mention personal responsibility, especially abstinence, in this country and before the echoes die down there are those denouncing it as unworkable. Anyone foolish enough to speak out on the importance of abstinence is considered naive at best.
Social programs that cost millions of dollars are promoted as the way to go. Abstinence is given a nod but damned with faint praise by Planned Parenthood and other groups.
It looks like such groups would rather see billions of federal dollars spent on their brand of education than to let church groups have a chance to promote abstinence at the church's own expense, albeit in the public arena.
They bawl and whine about separation of church and state but in reality what they can't stand is competition, especially when the competitors are pushing a proven method of preventing infection and pregnancy.
It's important that we continue to fund research into drugs that can fight the infection and I wouldn't suggest taking one thin dime from such efforts.
However, we should not pooh-pooh efforts that have proven so successful in other countries and we should be open to non-traditional methods to achieve what everybody is saying the goal is -- reducing the HIV/AIDs and pregnancy rates in this country.