A congressional battle looms over increases and amendments to the $15 billion AIDS program focusing primarily on sub-Saharan Africa. Desperately seeking a legacy that involves saving rather than snuffing out peoples' lives, Bush wants to double spending, the Democrats want to triple it -- everyone's on the same general page, for a change -- so who's the dissenting voice? If you guessed "pearl-clutching fetus fetishists", dingdingding! you win. What are they griping about now?"Democrats also want to slash spending on a multimillion-dollar component that emphasizes sexual abstinence. And that has conservative groups furious."That's right! The Democrats intend to stop throwing good money after bad into the areas that are provably ineffective, and concentrate funding on things that actually, um, work. And that's got the fundies feverishly beating their bibles and shrieking like hyenas in heat.
"Democrats have angered conservative groups with plans to remove a provision, inserted by the then-GOP controlled Congress five years ago, requiring that one-third of HIV/AIDS prevention money go to abstinence programs.That's about 7 percent of all spending. Another controversial provision that could come out forbids grants to groups that provide medical care to prostitutes." (Emphasis, and disgust, mine.)
Wow. I don't know about you, but I sure can't think of anything more Christian than refusing medical care to prostitutes, especially in an area of the world so devastatingly poverty-stricken that prostitution runs rampant. Have the foaming fundies revised their bibles to censor out the story of Mary Magdalene?
Finally, a spokesfetishist for that fount of bigotry and misogyny, the Family Research Council, removes any and all doubt that he and his ilk are batshit insane:
"McClusky accuses Democrats of trying to change the program into a bill that would promote sex trafficking and fund family planning programs that are involved in abortion."
Family planning = sex trafficking, got that? Jesus Christ in a flame-festooned sidecar, how long before these nitwits' ridiculous blatherings are relegated to the garbage dump of irrelevancy where they belong? Must we wait another year??
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