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Washington's HIV/AIDS policies should not be determined by theology. Date published: 2/9/2003 By RICK MERCIER THERE'S ALWAYS plenty going on at the Nairobi Youth Center in Mathare, a slum area on the edge of Kenya's capital city. On a recent day when I paid a visit, boys were gathered around a pool table and huddled in the television room watching a British soccer match, while girls, spending their time more productively, sat at sewing machines honing their seamstress skills. Geoffrey Maina's mission is to reach out to these young people. The fresh-faced 22-year-old volunteers 40 hours a week teaching Nairobi youth how to avoid contracting HIV, which has infected about one in eight Kenyan adults nationwide and at least one in five in Nairobi. A big part of his message, Maina told me, is abstinence--a claim borne out by the center's literature and posters. However, as he was leading me on a tour of the facility, he took a moment to stop and gesture toward a condom dispenser on a wall. "We have this for those who say they can't really abstain," he said. Most religious and social conservatives would have been appalled at this point in the tour. In Kenya, after all, Catholic church leaders have organized rallies where they burn condoms. Back in the United States, the religious right's attacks on condom use take different forms. Lately, they have included distorting the work of groups that promote condom distribution as one of the ways to combat HIV/AIDS. In a letter sent to the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development in October, Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-1st District, and nine other members of Congress--including the influential Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J.--protested an allocation of funds to a reproductive-health organization called the Population Council. The conservative lawmakers claimed the group's strategy for fighting HIV/AIDS "focuses only on condom promotion." Dr. Sam Kalibala, a medical associate for the Population Council, said Davis and the others are spreading misinformation. "They say if you have the word condom anywhere in your program, you don't promote abstinence," he said.
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