Senate Deadlocked On World AIDS Bill
Associated Press
Posted: June 19, 2008 - 5:00 pm ET
(Washington) At the White House on Thursday, President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two people behind a triumph of his administration, a program to fight the global AIDS pandemic. Down the street on Capitol Hill, a few Republican senators continued to block what would be a major expansion of that program.
Five years ago, at the urging of Bush, Congress approved $15 billion to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in Africa and other afflicted parts of the world.
The acclaimed program now supports anti-retroviral treatment for about 1.5 million and is on target to prevent 7 million new infections and provide care for 10 million, including orphans and vulnerable children.
The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief "has reached millions of people, preventing HIV infections in infants and easing suffering and bringing dying communities back to life," Bush said in presenting the Medal of Freedom to Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leading AIDS physician, and the late Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., a chief sponsor of both the 2003 AIDS legislation and the bill now before Congress.
Another big supporter of the AIDS act, which is known as PEPFAR, is Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a medical doctor who speaks of his own experiences in treating AIDS patients. "There is no question that PEPFAR has been the most successful foreign aid program since the Marshall Plan," Coburn said in a recent speech, referring to the U.S.' post-World War II program to rebuild Europe.
But Coburn is also the leader of a group of seven conservative Republicans who have blocked Senate action on a bill, supported by the White House, that would more than triple funding for the program to $50 billion over the next five years.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the bill in March, and the House overwhelmingly passed a similar bill in early April, but resistance from the seven senators has effectively kept it off the Senate floor. The current act expires at the end of September.
Opponents have questioned the big increase in spending, but they also have policy differences. The current act requires that 55 percent of the money go to treatment programs, but writers of the new bill, arguing that people on the ground can better determine what programs are most effective, removed that obligation.
Coburn wants it restored. He says that without it there is danger of money getting diverted into unrelated development and poverty programs. "Will we turn PEPFAR into just another bloated, unmeasured and unmeasurable foreign aid program with no accountability and no real impact?" he said.
Some conservatives are also leery of more money going into politically sensitive prevention programs involving the distribution of condoms, male circumcision or family planning. Conservatives already have had to give up a provision in the 2003 act that required that one-third of all HIV prevention funds be spent on abstinence programs.
In turn, liberals accepted some restrictions on family planning groups participating in AIDS programs.
Coburn, a budgetary hawk known for using parliamentary tactics to hold up bills, faces some heavyweight opponents in this battle. Presumed presidential nominees Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama are both co-sponsors of the Senate bill. "Today an estimated 40 million people around the world are living with HIV/AIDS, with over 4 million new infections in 2006 alone, Obama said this week. "I urge my colleagues to bring this important bill to the Senate floor for a vote as soon as possible."
Fourteen Republican senators, led by Richard Lugar of Indiana, top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, last month wrote Senate leaders urging quick consideration of the bill. PEPFAR, they wrote, "has served as a powerful demonstration of U.S. leadership and compassion throughout the world."
Lugar and others stressed the need to act before Bush heads for the G-8 summit of industrialized nations in Japan on July 7-9.
"When the United States takes action of this kind, it has an important impact on other nations," South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said Wednesday during a teleconference sponsored by the Global Aids Alliance. "The G-8 have promised $60 billion for universal access to people who are living with AIDS. When the United States takes the action that is being suggested in the legislation, that will generate more specific country commitments."
©365Gay.com 2008
Hollywood Remembers Board Agrees to Incorporate
Because of the success of last year's World AIDS Hollywood observance, the newly-expanded Board of Hollywood Remembers has taken initial steps to incorporate as a non-profit charitable/ educational entity, to ensure the ongoing concern for HIV and AIDS is not forgotten in Hollywood.
For further information, contact us at info@hollywoodremembers.org.
Hollywood Remembers engages Pacific Western Media
In order to reach a wider audience for the Movember 30 observance, the board of Hollywood Remembers has invited the participation of Pacific Western Media, to produce media kits and videos explaining our mission and goals.
Pacific Western Media's Rick Eisenlord is full involved in developin a master plan for public interpretation for the event, the 2nd annual concert/observance.
Huckbee Agrees To Meet With Mother of Ryan White
by The Associated Press
Posted: December 11, 2007 - 1:00 pm ET
(Des Moines, Iowa) Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's 15-year-old comments that AIDS patients should have been isolated have so alarmed the mother of Ryan White, an Indiana teenager whose life-ending battle with AIDS in the 1980s engrossed the nation, that she has asked for a meeting.
"I would be very willing to meet with them," the former Arkansas governor responded Tuesday while campaigning in western Iowa. "I would tell them we've come a long way in research, in treatment."
The GOP front-runner in Iowa's Jan. 3 caucuses stood by his 1992 comments in a broadcast interview Sunday, infuriating Jeanne White-Ginder, the late teen's mother and a board member of the AIDS Institute.
"It's so alarming to me," she said in a telephone interview Monday with The Associated Press from her home in Leesburg, Fla.
"It's very important to me that we don't live in the darkness" when people thought AIDS was transmitted through casual contact, such as by "kissing, tears, sweat and saliva," White-Ginder said. "We have to treat this disease like a disease, and like Ryan always said, not like a dirty word."
White was 13 when he was diagnosed with AIDS in December 1984, having contracted the disease from the blood-clotting agent used to treat his hemophilia. He was barred from school the following year out of fear the disease was spread casually. He died in 1990 at age 18.
On Tuesday, the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, and the AIDS Institute sent a letter to Huckabee asking him to meet with White-Ginder - who declined in the interview to say what political party she belongs to - and calling his comments "completely beyond comprehension."
In response, Huckabee told reporters in Council Bluffs, Iowa: "I certainly never would want to say anything that would be hurtful to them or anyone else. I would have great regret and anxiety if I thought my comments were hurtful or in any way added to the already incredible pain that families have felt regardless of how they contracted AIDS."
Once an underdog, the candidate has come under increased scrutiny as he has soared to the front-running position in the important Iowa caucuses and elsewhere over the past few weeks. He's faced criticism, in particular, for his comments on AIDS, and his records on parole, taxes and immigration in his decade as governor, and those issues were all but certain to be raised at a GOP debate in Iowa on Wednesday.
He said he expected more criticism to come.
"That's part of the way we unfortunately do politics in America," Huckabee said. "When you're a governor for ten and half years you make thousands of decisions every year. In office that long, you're going to have a lot of decisions people can pore through."
As a Senate candidate in 1992, Huckabee told the AP in a questionnaire that "we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague" if the federal government was going to deal with the spread of the disease effectively. "It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents," he said then.
In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Huckabee denied that those words were a call to quarantine the AIDS population, although he did not explain how else isolation would be achieved. "I didn't say we should quarantine," he said. The idea was not to "lock people up."
Huckabee acknowledged the prevailing scientific view then, and since, that the virus that causes AIDS is not spread through casual contact, but said that was not certain.
"I still believe this today," Huckabee said Sunday, that "we were acting more out of political correctness" in responding to the AIDS crisis. "I don't run from it, I don't recant it," he said of his position in 1992. Yet he said he would state his view differently in retrospect.
Huckabee outlined his views in 1992 for the AP more than a year after President George H.W. Bush, a fellow Republican, urged an audience of business executives not to fire or otherwise discriminate against employees infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
©365Gay.com 2007
ELCA NEWS SERVICE
ELCA Hosts Consultation on HIV, AIDS
CHICAGO (ELCA)--The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is in the process of developing a national church strategy on HIV and AIDS. The church hosted a consultation on HIV and AIDS here Sept. 7-9 that called together about 65 Lutherans from the United States and overseas to help guide the church's work in developing the strategy.
"Be attentive to the voices of those living with and affected by HIV and AIDS. Together we will find the courage to confront the continued marginalization and stigmatization that impacts those living with and affected by HIV and AIDS," said the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, ELCA presiding bishop, in a video greeting to participants.
Hanson said participants should be imaginative in building capacity to respond to challenges, find new ways to create awareness and engage in accompaniment and advocacy. He encouraged participants to continue their collaboration with one another. "We as religious people want to be involved on the ground as centers giving health resources, and to participate in education and advocacy," said Hanson.
"Be prophetic in speaking truth that not all have equal access to resources. This is a human rights issue and HIV and AIDS cannot be separated from issues of wealth, poverty and justice. This involves approbation, legislation and education." Special guests of the consultation included Lutherans from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, who shared stories and experiences of their work surrounding HIV and AIDS and offered the ELCA advice on issues and topics that a strategy on HIV and AIDS might address.
Representatives from the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, Lutheran AIDS Network, UNAIDS, and the Lutheran World Federation also attended the consultation.
The consultation served as a "listening post to hear voices from around the world and to gather input for an ELCA churchwide strategy on HIV and AIDS," according to Lita Brusick Johnson, associate executive director, ELCA Global Mission.
The consultation was "an opportunity to take stock of what we have been doing and see how we might engage more deeply and comprehensively in the future, to move from a crisis-response mode toward a more thoughtful campaign that would bring more synergy between domestic and international aspects of the work," said Brusick Johnson.
Information, stories and advice offered at the consultation were recorded and will be passed on to a writing team that will articulate some possible recommendations for the church to consider, said Josselyn N. Bennett, director for poverty ministries, ELCA Church and Society. This process will lead to a strategy on HIV and AIDS for the ELCA. "The strategy will be brought to the ELCA Church Council for (consideration) in 2008 and reported to the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly," said Bennett. The 2007 ELCA Churchwide Assembly called for the development of the strategy.
September 20, 2007
International Lutherans Counsel ELCA In Developing HIV And AIDS Strategy
CHICAGO (ELCA) -- Discrimination and stigma, poverty and hunger, distribution of medicine and access to health care are critical issues to consider in addressing the HIV and AIDS pandemic, according to Lutherans from Africa, Asia, Europe, South America and the United States.
In an effort to inform and advise members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) as the church develops an HIV and AIDS strategy, some Lutherans from around the world were invited here Sept. 10 to share with ELCA churchwide staff their experiences in HIV and AIDS work.
The center ofthe church's action is not on the virus but on the person, not on the disease but in the discrimination, said the Rev. Lisandro Orlov, a pastor of the United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Argentina (Iglesia Evangélica Luterana Unida), Buenos Aires.
The problem is people "confuse a medical diagnosis with a moral diagnosis. This confusion provokes brokenness in networks of solidarity" -- family solidarity, work solidarity, social and church, Orlov said. "We've (come to) understand that people with HIV don't wait for compassion. They wait for justice," he said, adding that HIV and AIDS is a political and theological matter. Orlov serves as the regional coordinator for the Lutheran World Federation's HIV and AIDS campaign in Latin America.
"If you agree to talk about HIV and AIDS in Africa, you must talk about poverty," said Bayo Oyebade, Jos, Nigeria. "This is what we've discovered." Oyebade is an ELCA missionary.
Oyebade said an important way for people to bring themselves out of poverty is to build job skills. "It is possible for people to help themselves," he said, stressing that an ELCA strategy ought to place an effort in job development.
"HIV and AIDS is an open subject in the church" in northern Cameroon, said Dr. Holly Nelson, a pediatrician and a former ELCA missionary who served in Ngaoundere, Cameroon. It is talked about openly in church, school, special seminars and even weddings, she said. "AIDS in Cameroon is not a racial issue," and "it's not a class issue," said Nelson. "For me, as a pediatrician, AIDS is a family issue."
With the knowledge that the government in South Africa has regarding HIV and AIDS medicine, "we would expect fewer deaths, would expect the epidemic to have turned from acute to a chronic condition, but it is the opposite. We are witnessing people dying at an alarming rate," said Verna Mzezewa, HIV and AIDS coordinator, Lutheran Communion in Southern Africa -- a communion of 18 Lutheran churches in southern Africa organized to promote fellowship.
"The Lutheran church is among the leading churches with HIV and AIDS programs. (They) may not be the most comprehensive programs, but they are doing something on the ground," said Mzezewa. She advised the ELCA to help build the capacity for communities to engage with one another and identify factors that fuel the spread of HIV and AIDS, so that the response is contextual and not blanketed. "My wish is for the church to find a niche in its response to HIV and AIDS, to make a difference and be relevant and meaningful to the situation on the ground," she said.
Dr. Jocelyn Mamy Ranaivoson, Nairobi, Kenya, said Lutheran churches across Africa are in a variety of stages in HIV and AIDS response. Some Lutheran churches in countries like Ethiopia and Tanzania started ministries in the 1980s, while others have yet to form a response where HIV and AIDS is prevalent, he said.
An HIV and AIDS program should have some focus on young people and women, concentrate on bringing together church leaders and congregations, and identify some of the most affected countries and build response there, said Ranaivoson. "In my context many pastors and church workers say that it is taboo to talk about sex because it is a sin," said Deaconess Mathilda Nainggolan, executive secretary and counselor on HIV and AIDS ministry, Huria Kristen Batak Protestan (Protestant Christian Batak Church), Sumatra, Indonesia. Nainggolan expressed the hope that one day stigma and discrimination will no longer be a reality. "Knowing about our bodies is not taboo," she said, "and the use of a condom is for protection, defense against disease."
"It is estimated that 1 percent of the Estonian population is infected, and it is mainly among Russian-speaking minorities and injected-drug users," said Eva-Liisa Luhaments, HIV and AIDS project coordinator, Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church. But given the stigma against HIV and AIDS in Estonia among doctors, church workers and others in society, the percentage of people infected may be as high as 10 percent of the population in Narva, a city on the border of Estonia and Russia, she said.
As part of her work, Luhaments conducts seminars about HIV and AIDS. The seminars "are meant for church workers, so they won't be afraid of this topic, and to activate churches more because, at the moment, churches are passive and distant from society," she said.
[Audio of comments by participants is available here.]
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Information about the ELCA's ministry on HIV and AIDS is at http://www.ELCA.org/aids and the ELCA's message on AIDS is at http://www.ELCA.org/socialstatements/aids on the church's Web site.
For information contact:
John Brooks, Director (773) 380-2958 or news@elca.org
http://www.elca.org/news
ELCA News Blog: http://www.elca.org/news/blog