Without Humanizing Sexuality, AIDS Will Continue to be a Threat

Pope Benedict XVI believes that the AIDS problem requires both a medical and pharmaceutical solution.

Bob Geldof, singer and political activist.

(MADRID, Spain) - In 2006 at a meeting of the British Labour Party, Bob Geldof, singer and political activist, publicly praised the policy to fight AIDS, explaining that monogamy, marital fidelity and sexual abstinence are the most effective weapons to fight against AIDS; in other words, those that ensure that this disease does not progress.

Curiously, his position is not based on religious values ​​but instead on studies that show that where this policy does not apply, AIDS continues to spread.

After 30 years of having discovered the cause of AIDS, the UN drew up a declaration promoting the means still used today to combat the virus, although they have failed miserably. Official data on the disease are staggering: around 33 million people have died over three decades, and each day the pandemic infects over 7,000 people worldwide. To cope with AIDS last year, more than 16,000 million dollars in economic aid were used to the fight against this social plague. The data that the UN is concerned about should rightly stir a deeper reflection on the matter. Without an authentic humanization of sexuality, AIDS will continue to be a threat; no matter how much the UN strives to look the other way.

Moreover, Republican Congressman of New Jersey, Chris Smith provided indisputable evidence of the victory: AIDS prevention events in African countries achieve successful results when they are founded upon abstinence and fidelity. From the House of Representatives, Smith drew a bill to revive the President's Emergency Plan for HIV/AIDS.

After citing the reports of the U.S. State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services – which prove the infallible measure of abstinence and fidelity in these programs – Smith pointed out that both measures have been an important factor to halt the spread of AIDS in Uganda, Kenya and Zimbabwe. These three provinces have shown declining HIV/AIDS spread rates. Reports indicate that this decline is due to the extension of abstinence and fidelity.

Furthermore, a report published on Science indicates that AIDS among men in Zimbabwe between the ages of 17 and 29 declined 23%. Among women aged 15 to 24, it decreased by 49%.

Pope Benedict XVI believes that the AIDS problem requires both a medical and pharmaceutical solution, but most of all, an ethical means to prevention based on abstinence, rejection of sexual promiscuity and marital fidelity in the name of the anthropology founded upon natural law and the Word of God, as explained in his Apostolic Exhortation Africae Munus, which contains the findings of the African Synod. (Translated by Gianna A. Sanchez-Moretti)

Author and journalist Clemente Ferrer has led a distinguished career in Spain in the fields of publicity and press relations. He is currently President of the European Institute of Marketing.

He has been Associate Professor of Business Management at the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Navarra and a contributor to the Madrid daily ABC. He also spent several years teaching, both in the Official School of Advertising as the School of Information Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 1985 he was awarded the Gold Master, granted by the Senior Management Forum and AMPE Prize 1996 to the "long and brilliant career advertising."

You can write to Clemente at this address: clementeferrer3@gmail.com