We can't blame the Pope for non-use of condoms
Wednesday March 25 2009
Who would be Pope Benedict? The poor German has merely to say "good morning", and the liberal tabloids are shrieking: "Thousands dead in Sudan; famine across the world; ecological disaster everywhere -- and Hitler Youth Pontiff thinks it's A GOOD MORNING!"
There is no falsehood that you can attribute to the Pope which will not instantly be believed by the liberal media, and the attack-dogs in the commentariat within. Insane interpretations are routinely grafted onto his most innocent observations, as happened last Christmas when his careful and subtly connected thoughts about climate change and the roles of the genders were put into the Catholic-hating media blender. A micro-second later, out came the result, and the internet, the Coliseum of our age, was hysterically denouncing the Pope for saying that gay love was causing global warming and the death of the planet.
So when I heard that he had spoken out about the ineffectiveness of condoms in preventing AIDS, I knew what would follow. And by God -- if He will forgive this unusually appropriate invocation of His Name in this column -- I was right. For what is it about sex which so diminishes rational thought? If the owners of a nuclear power station said that its current safety measures permitted a "mere" 5pc chance of it leaking plutonium onto visitors, how many of our condom-enthusiasts would be queuing to get into the place? Yet AIDS is a sexual plutonium, which not merely will kill you, your spouse, your lovers, but also your children.
Look. It's simple. As part of an anti-AIDS programme, condoms are unnecessary within a sexually continent people -- Loreto nuns, say, or married couples who don't stray from the marital bed. But condoms will not prevent the spread of AIDS amongst a general population of sexually promiscuous individuals. Even if used conscientiously (which never happens in public health programmes) the best condoms in the world have a failure rate of around 5pc. Thus, actuarially, within a population group of say 20,000, there will on average be 1,000 failures on each occasion its members have sex. Not merely will these failures usually be random, so too will the consequences, especially if the members of the group are having multiple partners. In time, a very large number of the condom-using group will become infected by AIDS. This is not a probability: it is an epidemiological certainty.
Even to contemplate having full sexual intercourse, with a rubber sheath a few microns thick as the sole protection against the transmission of one the most deadly diseases the world has ever known, is simply to seek the comforts of a modernistic juju.
Yet the liberal-left will not merely endorse this juju, but they will lynch (in that caring, compassionate way they have) anyone who casts doubt on its potency. This is 21st century witchdoctor worship, as practised by white, post-Christian, well-educated secularists. In this viral scrabble, Voodoo leads to VD, and VD leads to HIV, and HIV to AIDS, and AIDS leads to RIP: all very slow, all very horrible, and all so very certain.
Researchers have arrived at the same conclusion: no public health programme based on condoms has ever succeeded in eradicating, or even seriously lowering, the rate of any sexual infection amongst a general population. The AIDS epidemic amongst homosexuals in the US was different. It was tackled by a massive change in habit within a highly focussed and self-aware community, largely drawn from the richest and most highly educated people in the world.
These terms cannot be used about the populations of most of Africa, where illiteracy is enormous, and where condoms are either not available, or the Catholic Church has no practical influence (and probably both these conditions apply). So, it's simply not the case that tens of millions of Africans are actually refusing to use condoms because of the Pope's instructions; and nor is it the case that they would start to use them the moment he waved his crosier of pontifical authorisation. Indeed, he is about as much a moral guiding-force on how the majority of Africans live their sex lives as he is on the movement of the continental land masses. Which of course, doesn't stop all those frothing, emoting, "liberal" lunatics from accusing him of murder.
Now, we civvies are able to say things that the Pope cannot. We might suggest, for example, that young people -- who are going to have pelvic refreshment of some kind, come what may (so to speak), no matter what their elders tell them -- should enjoy non-penetrative sex before they settle down into a monogamous relationship.
The holder of the keys of the Vatican really cannot be heard, ex-cathedra, to be urging young men and women to engage in non-penetrative sex rather than to be engaging in full-blown sex.
Moreover, the judicious absence of any recent Papal condemnation of non-penetrative sexual pleasure might well be a clue to what he actually means. But he just can't say that. He's the Pope, remember, not Mary O'Conor.
kmyers@independent.ie
