Last month, I wrote a story on why the government won’t fund local youth AIDS prevention group WAIT (or Washington AIDS International Teens). WAIT’s problem was this:

a. Their goal was stopping the spread of HIV.

b. Their methodology was abstinence.

c. The government only funds one or the other.

Last week, President Obama proposed to add another roadblock to their fight for funding by cutting abstinence-only cash from the budget altogether.

Now, groups like WAIT, which represent the most practical side of abstinence eduction—delaying sex only to prevent an uncurable deadly disease—will remain, well, pretty much unaffected. As I detailed in my piece, federally-funded abstinence-only education was always itself too much of a “comprehensive” strategy. In order to receive federal funding, abstinence groups couldn’t just work against AIDS—they also had to teach prevention of “out-of-wedlock pregnancy”; that “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity”; and that “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”

So while proponents of comprehensive sex education rejoice at the White House rule, some abstinence advocates, at least, aren’t lamenting the move: abstinence’s realists have always been left behind.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery.

This week, I wrote a cover story for the paper on the sex life at the Catholic University of America, the official U.S. university of the Catholic Church. The Washington, D.C. school bans all behavior that is “inconsistent with the teaching and moral values of the Catholic Church”—including premarital sex, condom use, masturbation, and sexual assault.

Every year, Catholic’s coeds manage to successfully compromise the university policies—and their own chastity—within the school’s residence halls (and, according to one student, in the student center). The difficulty, for students and administrators, is acknowledging that sex happens. Consistent with Catholic tradition, sex isn’t sex at the Catholic University of America if nobody knows about it.

You can pick up the story on newsstands tomorrow.

Illustration by Doug Boehm

Devon Hunter, a “a career exotic dancer with formal, professional training in dance and theatre,” set out on the streets hit the clubs of D.C. last weekend in the hopes of launching a new safe-sex campaign. All the guys he approached thought Devon Hunter—who should call me, by the way—was totally lame.

Read More ““Condoms Are So 1985″” »

These guys, however, are probably hurting.

Cristina Page for Reproductive Health Reality Check wrote yesterday on one sector of the economy that hasn’t hurt from the economic downturn: Birth control sales. Page’s evidence of a contraceptive spike:

- Vasectomy.com has fielded a 30 percent increase in appointment requests since January

Read More “Birth Control Thrives During Recession” »

Zack Rosen over at The New Gay wrote an excellent column the other day about the importance of condom use within the gay community. The post covers a lot of ground—personal responsibility, modes of transmission, casual anal bleeding:

A couple years ago when one of the cutest boys I’d ever seen begged me to fuck him without a condom. Actually, beg is the wrong word. He pleaded. He whined. He implored me not to use one as if it was simply some seasoning our our sexual entree that he found disagreeable.

Read More “Are Condoms As Important to Straights as They are to Gays?” »

Condoms.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, helps fight AIDS by distributing tens of millions of condoms worldwide. The initiative hasn’t just helped to save lives—it’s also supported the jobs of hundreds of U.S. condom-makers. But the AIDS-fighting, job-creating super match-up couldn’t last: The U.S. government is now switching its condom source to lower-cost rubbers produced China and other countries. Some say the change is “expected to cost 300 American jobs.” The change, however, will save three cents on each condom: American condoms run a pricey five-cents-a-pop, whereas Chinese prophelactics go for a cool two cents.

Photo by ~chichun~

In a column defending the Pope’s anti-condom stance, Washington Times columnist Jeffery T. Kuhner has some advice today for District residents who don’t want to contract HIV. Let’s take a look!

The District’s official report this week was astounding: The number of people with HIV infections rose 22 percent from 2006 to 2007. More ominously, the report said 6.5 percent of the city’s black men are infected—that is more than 1 in 20. The disease is decimating not only the District’s gay community, but its African-American neighborhoods. Yet, the city has a major condom distribution program: More than 1.5 million condoms were distributed in 2008. In other words, it is raining condoms and still the District’s AIDS rate is soaring. The answer is not free birth control or more sex education, but a return to the old Judeo-Christian moral order—marriage, abstinence and personal responsibility.

If Kuhner thinks that marriage is a leading protector against HIV, and that “the District’s gay community” is the one most affected by the crisis, what better solution to stop HIV than to OK gay marriage? Ever since the new District’s AIDS numbers came out, conservatives have been quick to point out that throwing condoms at HIV is about as effective as throwing the Pope at Africa. It’s time for conservatives to bolster their anti-condom stances with real solutions: Allowing men to have monogamous gay sex under legal marriage protection.

According to the Guardian, the Vatican has released an alternate version of Pope Benedict XVI’s remark that the AIDS problem “cannot be overcome with the distribution of condoms which, on the contrary, increase the problem.” According to a statement on the Holy See’s Web site (which awesomely exists), the Pope actually said this:

Read More “Vatican Attempts Condom Smear Control” »

Actually, this is enough to make me not want to have sex ever again.

The Washington Post’s editorial board published a piece today arguing that “Pope Benedict XVI Is Wrong on Condoms.” An understatement, sure, but I was still glad to see our newspaper of record take God’s gift to Africa down a notch. Until I got, oh, four sentences in:

In a perfect world, people would abstain from having sex until they were married or would be monogamous in committed relationships.

Now, at long last, we know what a perfect world would look like!

Read More “Washington Post Employs Faulty Pope Logic” »