At the XV Annual Conference

This morning, as most mornings, I again passed by the dying AIDs victim lying in the grass by the statue at the park entrance. I can't tell if it's a man or a woman. A woman, I think, but it's hard to tell. All I can see is some sticklike limbs curled around a shapeless body. She/he lies there in a fetal position most of the day; I see her/him there sometimes when I pass by on the way home from work, too.
At the same time, across town, the XV International HIV/AIDs Conference is taking place. Its motto "Access for All" probably doesn't apply to the dying person in the park; with an admission fee of a thousand dollars, I suspect the conference is financially out of reach of this person, who I doubt has a thousand of anything. The conference attendees tend toward the clean, neat, well-fed and well cared for. People with resources. Still, the conference is bound to have some positive results. Solutions will meet problems. People will learn things. Some people will become more aware of some facts. There are of course demonstrators, who shout "hypocrisy" at the attendees, angry that the plague doesn't seem to be taken seriously enough. And, certainly, there are politicians and the famous-and-beautiful who come to events like this to get their pictures taken. Hypocritical it may be, but perhaps there is an appropriate quid pro quo here. The politician gets mention in the news, and so does the conference. And so does the disease. So,in the end, the HIV/AIDs plague gains in importance in the public consciousness.
I think though, that some will manage to avoid learning anything from this conference. They (typically the most demonstratively pious) will remain adamant that the only solution to the AIDs plague is - no sex. If you persist in being sinful, you must be punished, I guess; with pregnancy, with disease, with death perhaps. While not uniquely true only of the Catholic Church, Rome does manage to maintain a certain Pride of Place. In a recent document issued by Cardinal Trujillo, who is president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, it is claimed that the use of condoms provides a false sense of safety, and is likely to increase sexual activity, thus increasing the rate of transmission of HIV. He has included some references to tests of condoms, in which he completely misstates the conclusions reached by the testing scientists. Tests of condoms, as well as comparing HIV infection rates with condoms use, show quite clearly that their use reduces infection rates tremendously. Given the unbending animosity of the church to condoms and other pregnancy prevention devices, though, one suspects that this is a self-serving attempt to manipulate the less-than-well-informed. And a deliberate ignoring of the procreation imperative that impels sexual activity.
In the insistence on abstinence only, a teaching of not only the church in Rome, but also of the current United States administration and its fellow travellers among the more conservative protestant church leaders, we see that there are others besides me who sometimes espouse ideas that fall into the category of "Good Idea; Too Bad It's Wrong."