How Not To Celebrate Worlds Aids Day

Today, December 1st, is the 11th annual World Aids Day, with world wide events that are focused on raising awareness to this deadly disease and the struggle to overcome it.

Started on 1st December 1988, World AIDS Day is about raising money, increasing awareness, fighting prejudice and improving education. The World AIDS Day theme for 2009 is 'Universal Access and Human Rights'. World AIDS Day is important in reminding people that HIV has not gone away, and that there are many things still to be done.

According to UNAIDS estimates, there are now 33.4 million people living with HIV, including 2.1 million children. During 2008 some 2.7 million people became newly infected with the virus and an estimated 2 million people died from AIDS. Around half of all people who become infected with HIV do so before they are 25 and are killed by AIDS before they are 35.

The vast majority of people with HIV and AIDS live in lower- and middle-income countries. But HIV today is a threat to men, women and children on all continents around the world.

With the theme this year, Universal Access and Human Rights, it is absolutely obscene that the news out of Africa today is from Uganda, where there is proposed legislation in the government that would actually call for the execution of HIV infected gay men if enacted.

Now, Uganda has been one of the tentative success stories in Africa as far as the fight against AIDS goes. After The tragic civil war had ended,  a relatively stable goverment of President Musenvi was installed in 1986. This government is still in power 13 years later.

During that period, starting in 1988, Uganda began to effectively fight AIDS through education and free drugs. Things now have stabilized with around 1,000,000 cases on record and over 1.5 million orphaned children.

Things were not helped by the interventionist policies of The Bush Administration which put its emphasis on medical aid tied to treaching religious inspired sexual abstinence as a precondition. this policy in fact, led to a scarcity of condoms at a time that they could have done the most good.

Enter the American Religious Entrepreneur whose statement about homosexuals caused such a furor last year before he was chosen to deliver the oath of office at Barack Obama's Inaugaration, Fundamentalist Pastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church.

Warren has been very active in Africa as promoter of a project called "The Purpose Driven Nation". He and a group of Fundamentalist leaders have made it their project to create Africa as the first "Purpose Driven Continent".

They have met with leaders and Warren has had many meeting with Ugandan Government officials. He is very connected with the rabidly anti homosexual Ugandan Arch-Bishop Henry Orombi.

The ugly results are the proposed anti homosexual witch hunt they are trying to ignite.

Last week, Newsweeks Lisa Miller referred to this proposed legislation as another holocaust and said for a person who calls abortion "another holocaust" and tries to stop it all over the world, this action by Warren is extremely hypocritical.

When she put the question to the self proclaimed moral leader, Warren deferred and said that,"As a pastor, my job is to encourage and support. I never take sides."

I think that as an entrepreneur and exploitive opportunistic religious snake oil salesman, who is on the verge of making millions more off his investments and university in Africa, he is more interested in not upsetting his little applecart with inconvenient moral questions.

UPDATE........

The latest information revealed that the group of Ugandan Fundamentalist Christians lawmakers advocating this policy which is bald faced murder are actually members of the

secretive group of religious right law makers that control a powwrful K-Street Lobby in The United States: The Family. The link was made on Rachel Maddows  CNBC show yesterday
UPDATE....

Rick Warren wonders why there’s so much fuss over the rights of gays.

In recent days, Pastor Rick Warren has come under fire for refusing to condemn an Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda that would make some homosexual acts punishable by death. “[I]t is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations,” said Warren. On his Twitter feed, Warren is now trying to change the subject, claiming that “no one” cared when 146,000 Christians died last year (so why should he now care about gay men and women in Africa?):

The Ugandan legislation — supported by a pastor whom Warren has welcomed into his church — would mandate that any person “convicted of gay sex is liable to life imprisonment.” If that person is HIV positive or has sex with a minor or a person with a disability, he or she would be guilty of “aggravated homosexuality” and face the death penalty. The bill also proposes up to three years of imprisonment for anyone who “fails to report within 24 hours the identities of everyone they know who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, or who supports human rights for people who are.”