The Bush administration is barring private American AIDS organizations from winning federal grants to provide health services overseas unless they pledge their opposition to prostitution, as part of a broader Republican effort in recent weeks to apply conservative values to foreign-assistance programs.
The White House move comes as Republican lawmakers have been pressing the administration to cut off funds to private organizations that encourage clean-needle programs overseas for intravenous drug users – a group at the center of the AIDS epidemic in Central Asia and other areas.
Some also are pressing to ban federal funding of all AIDS organizations that fail to accept the presidents social agenda on such issues as sexual abstinence and drug abuse.
At stake are billions of dollars in U.S. funds that private health organizations working in the developing world spend on AIDS programs.
Administration officials recently started requiring U.S. AIDS groups seeking federal grants as support for their overseas programs to sign a pledge publicly opposing prostitution.
– There is conservative support for AIDS programs, said Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican adding: – But there are areas of concern…that risk the continued support from a number of conservative members and conservative groups.
Many AIDS organizations are reluctant to issue a statement condemning prostitution because they work closely with prostitutes on health initiatives such as distributing condoms.
The groups say such official stigmatization would increase the women’s isolation, making it harder for them to receive AIDS prevention and treatment services. Many nongovernmental organizations in the AIDS field are critical of the administration moves.
– This is another salvo in the campaign that the administration and its fellow conservatives are undertaking to create more and more litmus tests and blacklists of those they are willing to do business with, said Susan Cohen, director of government affairs for the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a private think tank that does research on sexual and reproductive health and favors abortion rights.
The dispute marks an escalation in the decades-long debate over attaching moral strings to U.S. foreign assistance. Until now, that battle has centered largely on whether U.S. aid should go to groups providing abortion counseling and services overseas.
The new policy shift regarding prostitution stems from two 2003 laws, one applying to AIDS grants and the other to sex trafficking, which involves luring or forcing individuals into prostitution.
The Bush administration had previously applied the requirement only to overseas groups because the Justice Department initially advised that it would be an unconstitutional violation of free speech to demand that American grant applicants support Mr. Bushs policy. But the Justice Department reversed itself last fall.
The charged debate over morality and AIDS programs has drawn new fuel recently from the practice known in the AIDS field as “harm reduction.”
Many AIDS groups – some of them considered liberal on social issues – say the best way to limit the disease is to acknowledge that some people inevitably engage in risky behavior – intravenous drug use, prostitution or multipartner sex, for example – and health workers should try to both discourage those activities and make them less dangerous.
Some conservative groups, on the other hand, urge a just-say-no approach, arguing that making prostitution and intravenous drug use less risky encourages people to engage in them.
At a recent congressional hearing, John Walters, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said: – We have been pretty aggressive with international bodies that have…drifted toward harm reduction, more aggressive than I believe others have been in the past.
Mr. Bush, who has made AIDS prevention and treatment a centerpiece of his effort to convey a compassionate side to his conservatism, asked Congress for 3,2 billion US dollar for international HIV programs for fiscal 2006.
Most such spending is channeled through the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services to private organizations and other health groups working in developing nations.
The new strictures from the White House and Congress match proposals of various conservative religious groups that claim credit for helping the president win re-election. Some are now for the first time applying for such grant money.
Kilde: The Push Journal
