Wholesale Ban of Condom Use By Vatican on Faithful Flock Leads To Rise of AIDS Virus in Latin America

It's a pathetic, frustrating & almost hapless situation: Every year, millions of people are infected with AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), and millions more will die as a result of it. According to UNAIDS, 38.6 million people are currently living with the HIV virus, with an estimated 25 million killed since the virus was discovered in 1981.

The figures are staggering, and the sheer numbers of lives lost to such a devastating disease should probably jolt our senses and make our hairs stand on end. If anything else, all efforts should not be spared to halt this viral scourge..... unless, of course, religious "sentiments" are weighed in and factored with nary a thought for those afflicted with the disease.

The Vatican's Stand: No Condoms Please, We Prefer Altar Boys

Inevitably, when sexual issues crop up, the Vatican surely has a say in such matters. As the de facto moral police (oddly, they seem to have more than a fair share of sexual anomalies amongst their ranks, some of whom have weird fetishes with altar boys) for two thousand years, the Vatican loves to impose sexual boundaries & proprieties upon its members: Women can't be priests, homosexual sex is a sin against God (Even if Jesus is depicted gay in almost every god-damned church on this planet), and yes.........no condoms during sex.

For some unfathomable reason, the Catholic Church views sex as a one-way street: You can only engage in sexual acts as a means of pro-creation. Leisurely masturbation is forbidden (and sex with altar boys not???). Hence, the natural progression to this weird ban on condoms, which, rather conveniently, prevents insemination and the spread of........yes, you got it, AIDS, plus a whole host of other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

While such a ban has no bearing as far as the right to using condoms is concerned, the Catholic Church's self-enforced ban on its roughly 1 billion members means that a fair portion of the more pious, fundamentalist flock are going to take the words of those perverted Vatican priests seriously, and in tandem with the Church's continuous smear campaigns against the safety of condom use (check out my previous post, here), countries with Catholic-dominated populaces are suffering from a huge resurgence of the AIDS epidemic.

Catholic condom ban helping AIDS spread in Latam: U.N.

Tue Oct 23, 2:31 AM ET

The rapid spread in Latin America of the virus that causes AIDS is made worse by the Roman Catholic Church's stand against using condoms, a U.N. official said on Monday.

Some 1.7 million people across Latin America are infected with the HIV virus or full-blown AIDS, and the epidemic is spreading swiftly with up to 410,000 new cases in 2006, up from as many as 320,000 new cases in 2004, according the UN AIDS program, UNAIDS.

"In Latin America the use of condoms has been demonized, but if they were used in every relation I guarantee the epidemic would be resolved in the region," said Alberto Stella, the UNAIDS Coordinator for Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

The Catholic Church, which holds sway in Latin America despite the rise in evangelical churches, opposes all forms of contraception and instead promotes abstinence as a way to avoid spreading AIDS.

"The fact young people start to be sexually active between 15 and 19 without sex education contributes to the spreading of the virus, as well as the fact that the evidence shows abstinence is not working," Stella told Reuters.

Latin America is home to nearly half the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, but the Church's position on premarital sex and contraception often clashes with modern values. Brazil, the region's largest Catholic nation, regularly distributes free condoms to try and bring down HIV infection rates.

My Suggestion To The Pope: Go Smoke Dope

Good Ole Popey..........

Why these demons of an old, archaic, utterly immoral institution can hypnotize the masses in America does stump me, even though I understand that much of it has to do with the Inquisitors. 21st century modernization and Bronze Age mythology doesn't seem to click together too well.

I have a suggestion for the Pope and his crazy legions of old, sneering priests: Instead of spreading lies and uttering bullshit, why don't they just lie on their couches like old folks do, and smoke some good, old fashioned dope?

The world sure is a better place without these meddling old buffoons around.

Religious Lunacy 101: Hospital Staff Refuses to Dispense Morning After-Pill to Rape Victims

It is a curious trait in monotheistic religions: Women are somehow inferior to men in every aspect: Not only are women look down as weaker counterparts of men, they are being discriminated by conservatives who seem to have this fixation with enforcing archaic, misguided rules and regulations upon women.

One need not look further from the annals of the bible to figure this misogynous attitudes towards women:

After Adam is created, Eve was created from the rib of Adam, suggesting that Eve, as the first woman (According to the Talmud and other religious texts, Lilith was the first woman created for Adam), was created only for the sake of alleviating Adam's boredom (and perhaps his sexual urges???).

In short, Eve, as a representative of women, must submit to her Man (in this case, Adam), because thanks to God's warped logic, she is now no more than an extension of Adam's rib.

According to the Original Sin concept, Eve, in the role of a temptress, persuaded Adam to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, after she had been similarly tempted by a talking snake (Which, according to Genesis, was Satan's animistic guise).

For her unflattering role, Eve was condemned to be a bearer of children, an inextricable fate which not only has to be borne by her, but every other women since.

If one buys into, and beliefs in this bullshit tale wholeheartedly, it is not difficult to understand the "moral" precepts behind this sad, misguided tale of neglect, heartlessness, and pure biblical misogyny.

Rape Victim Victimized By "Holier-Than-Thou" Doc???

Doctors' beliefs hinder patient care
New laws shore up providers’ right to refuse treatment based on values
By Sabrina Rubin Erdely
(MSNBC)
Updated: 2:26 p.m. ET June 22, 2007

Lori Boyer couldn't stop trembling as she sat on the examining table, hugging her hospital gown around her. Her mind was reeling. She'd been raped hours earlier by a man she knew — a man who had assured Boyer, 35, that he only wanted to hang out at his place and talk. Instead, he had thrown her onto his bed and assaulted her. "I'm done with you," he'd tonelessly told her afterward. Boyer had grabbed her clothes and dashed for her car in the freezing predawn darkness. Yet she'd had the clarity to drive straight to the nearest emergency room — Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania — to ask for a rape kit and talk to a sexual assault counselor. Bruised and in pain, she grimaced through the pelvic exam. Now, as Boyer watched Martin Gish, M.D., jot some final notes into her chart, she thought of something the rape counselor had mentioned earlier.

"I'll need the morning-after pill," she told him.

Dr. Gish looked up. He was a trim, middle-aged man with graying hair and, Boyer thought, an aloof manner. "No," Boyer says he replied abruptly. "I can't do that." He turned back to his writing.

Boyer stared in disbelief. No? She tried vainly to hold back tears as she reasoned with the doctor: She was midcycle, putting her in danger of getting pregnant. Emergency contraception is most effective within a short time frame, ideally 72 hours. If he wasn't willing to write an EC prescription, she'd be glad to see a different doctor. Dr. Gish simply shook his head. "It's against my religion," he said, according to Boyer. (When contacted, the doctor declined to comment for this article.)

Boyer left the emergency room empty-handed. "I was so vulnerable," she says. "I felt victimized all over again. First the rape, and then the doctor making me feel powerless." Later that day, her rape counselor found Boyer a physician who would prescribe her EC. But Boyer remained haunted by the ER doctor's refusal — so profoundly, she hasn't been to see a gynecologist in the two and a half years since. "I haven't gotten the nerve up to go, for fear of being judged again," she says.

Here, our good Dr Gish (Gee, doesn't his name bear some resemblance to that erstwhile director of Institute For Creation Research - Duane Gish?) refuses to dispense any form of assistance to the rape victim, despite the fact that doctors are sworn, by profession, to dedicate their lives to assist patients.

Perhaps, a few thought processes might be going through his mind:

1. It is better for the rape victim to bear the rapist's child - after all, what can a woman do, besides giving birth to and raising babies???

2. It must have been the victim's fault: If she had covered herself from head to toe in a burkha, tragedy would not have descended upon her like the plague. Conclusion? She deserves to be raped.

Seriously, is this the kind of vindictive, callous doctor we would expect to save our lives in times of difficulty? The type who would dispense religiously-slanted moral tidbits and bias instead of lifesaving, pain-alleviating health care?

Religious Nutjobs and Their Erstwhile Hospitals

From a personal perspective, I have never approved of religious encroachment into any education and medical institutions of any kind. Having witnessed firsthand how religious morons can basically screw up secular education to fit into their silly medieval concepts, I find it morally reprehensible that religious groups are actually allowed to roughshod and pervert the medical profession.

Incidents like this merely reinforce my belief in not only the Separation of Church and State, but the separation of the Church from just about everything else: Everything that the Church touches turns into a convoluted form of the Midas Touch: Education becomes a religious comedy of the Flintstones variety, hospitals become agents of enforced pregnancy and loss of civil liberties, and donations to mega churches are fleeced by bastards in the form of wealthy, fat, obnoxious Reverends.

The MSNBC Article further enthuses:

".....Catholic and conservative Christian health care providers are denying women a range of standard, legal medical care. Planned Parenthood M.D.s report patients coming to them because other gynecologists would not dole out birth control prescriptions or abortion referrals. Infertility clinics have turned away lesbians and unmarried women; anesthesiologists and obstetricians are refusing to do sterilizations; Catholic hospitals have delayed ending doomed pregnancies because abortions are only allowed to save the life of the mother. "

In a survey published this year in The New England Journal of Medicine, 63 percent of doctors said it is acceptable to tell patients they have moral objections to treatments, and 18 percent felt no obligation to refer patients elsewhere.

Religious Stupidity Has No Place In The Field of Medicine

If anything else, this episode highlights the need to ostracize religious-based medical institutions, particular those which force patients to submit to their religiously entrenched, archaic regulations which would have been more at home during the time of the Crusades than 21st century Medicine.

If religious hospitals do not wish to play God and dispense with medication, kindly close shop and allow secular ones to do so.

After all, no woman should deserve the ignominous suffering of rape, plus mental rape and abuse dispensed by self-righteous bastards in labcoats and stethoscopes.