Finding a delightful and life-giving use for post-colonial Euro attempts at culling the non-white numbers so despised by white population planners whose motto is “Just Enough of Me. Way Too Much of You!” Go Africa!
White First World Population Planners are perpetually bent on reducing the carbon footprint of impoverished third world countries they deem to have “too many children”. They have to fly all over the world on hundreds of jets every year to make sure that some guy burning a few sticks to cook his dinner in Kenya doesn’t suck up all the resources that are rightfully ours.
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Someone tell me please, how we can stop this! We can’t let this horror spread to Africa as well! What can we do to stop this!? This is horrible! Horrible!
The readings today 07/07/10 among other things urge us to “seek the face of God.” I was wondering what the “face of God,” meant, exactly. I think perhaps “the face of God,” may be discovered in the actions and the particularly the smiles of the young man and the children in this video. The Holy Spirit defeats the evil of the world with the humble service of the young man who responds to evil influence of the world with love.
The movie maker and company and the writer of this blog also reflect the work of the Holy Spirit as well obviously. Thanks!
But Mark, the reason why most of the United States supports condom distribution in Africa as “obvious common sense” has nothing to do with population and everything to do with AIDS. The Paul Ehrlichs of the world still peddle their discredited theories to the faithful, but that’s not the crowd - a crowd that includes a huge proportion of the entire West - that sees the Catholic Church’s stance on this to be equivalent to denying bicycle helmets to a nation of children who keep cracking their heads on the sidewalk.
Mark -
Thanks! My smile grew & grew as I realized how useful our “first world” “gift” could actually be!
Jon,
To work off your metaphor; a condom is to a bicycle helmet as cheese cloth is to an umbrella. You don’t improve on a person’s problem by giving them a false solution.
Also the “nation of children” attitude of the West seems to me to be at the root of the problem with the “solutions” the West pushes on the rest of the world.
The Church is offering solutions rooted in truth that prove themselves by their successes.
The article referenced in this link demonstrates how you accomplish real success in fighting AIDS.
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/sexuality/se0205.htm
Jon W brings up a good point. Many people really do believe that condoms are the solution to AIDS and poverty. I have never seen anything to the effect of “too many black people” on liberal sites.
As Brian pointed out, I’m not arguing that condoms are a particularly effective way of combating AIDS. I’m just pointing out that population pressure is not the reason everyone and his brother finds condom distribution in Africa compelling and the Catholic Church’s opposition to it extremely scandalous. We sound like desperate polemicists without no good arguments when we attack our opponents on grounds they do not claim to hold.
Ha! Go Africa indeed. Great video!
For a source of respectable arguments against the condoms for AIDS prevention:
“When Pope Benedict XVI commented this month that condom distribution isn’t helping, and may be worsening, the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa, he set off a firestorm of protest. Most non-Catholic commentary has been highly critical of the pope. A cartoon in the Philadelphia Inquirer, reprinted in The Post, showed the pope somewhat ghoulishly praising a throng of sick and dying Africans: “Blessed are the sick, for they have not used condoms.”
Yet, in truth, current empirical evidence supports him. “
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032702825.html
Promoting condoms to prevent AIDS while not trying to promote chastity, is like promoting Kevlar helmets to national armies, while not trying to promote making peace with your adversaries. Regardless of what type of helmet you use, Death will always increase drastically when engaging in war, compared to engaging in peace.
Condoms of course are worse, because they give people a false sense of security to engage in risky behavior which no one needs to be convinced would be enjoyable. Most people on the other hand have a natural concern about going to war and being shot at, regardless of the what type of helmet they use.
Now THIS is the commercial they ought to show during the World Cup!
That’s how those things are supposed to be used??!! Oops. You’ll never guess what I’ve been doing with them…
Condoms are a much better method of protecting against AIDS than not using them at all. Africa has plenty of AIDS spread around without condom use, and I doubt any of the men alley-catting around, spreading the disease, give a crap about NFP.
I love how the catholic church is against condoms, birth control period, and abortions. We live in a world where we all make priorities. Select the one that is most important and direct your focus on it, until trying to kill a million birds with one stone. Seriously, is the distribution of condoms in third world countries worse than abortion? Are birth control and the spread of STD’s mutually exclusive? Simple answers to complex questions are very rarely the best solution. However, rigidness in values that are only passed down from a priest that is the only one permitted to speak directly to God (but molests hundreds of children and covers up the disgusting crimes of other elders) is a moot point in the grand vision of Catholicism.
I am a Christian myself but I challenge my self to think rationally and out of the box. Clearly, no birth control, no sex (except priests with boys), and no abortions is not a logical solution to a complex problem. Hey, let’s just castrate everyone who isn’t a Catholic. Or… better yet, everyone who isn’t a Catholic plus Catholic priests, bishops and elders. Now that is as logical as the solutions proposed by the Diocese in my lifetime.
properly used, condoms are an extremely effective preventative for aids and other stds, as well as a contraceptive. “studies” that say otherwise are bogus efforts to push a religious agenda at the expense of safety and reproduction control.
This video is deeply upsetting to me and makes light of a serious problem. I worked in Rwanda last summer, where couples have an average of six children. Overpopulation is a serious problem in that small country. Women typically do not want that many children. They want children they can afford to feed, clothe, and send to school. In addition, many married women in Africa get AIDS from their promiscuous husbands—a cultural norm. Are condoms the whole solution? No. But can they save some lives and also help those who want to limit their families to a manageable size so they don’t have to watch children die of hunger and disease? Yes. The Church irresponsibly and cynically encourages the myth that contraception is a new form of colonialism. It considers an egg and sperm “life” but don’t care once they are united and become a living child that needs enough to survive on, thus condemning many children to a short and miserable life.
I’ll grant that if population growth, resource depletion, and environmental degradation lead to a great dying-off, it will make sense afterward to beat our condoms into soccer balls.
Great new book on this topic: Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS: What Africa Can Teach the West, by Matthew Hanley and Jokin de Irala. Cites lots of scientific data to show the failure of condom promotion and the success of abstinence and fidelity in marriage.
I once heard a nurse working in Haiti say that most people in that country did not have access to clean water and medicine. But, by god, they had plenty of condoms! This video illustrates that important point. These third world countries have major issues to deal with, but the West is so stupid that it thinks condoms and abortion are the end all/be all solution to some very complicated problems. Moreover, it is irresponsible to act like condoms will solve the AIDS epidemic in Africa. People will continue to go around having promiscuous sex thinking they are “Safe”. What needs to change is the behavior. And Sarah, it doesn’t matter if you have one kid, six kids, or no kids in Africa if you don’t have access to clean water, education, health care, or a decent job. It is not overpopulation that is the problem in Africa,it is corrupt governments.
For those who would decry the idea of promoting abstinence as a method for preventing AIDS, I would suggest you read the UN report from a couple of years back citing a 40% drop in the cases of AIDS in Uganda after the country decided to scrap the promoting condoms campaign and push for abstinence instead.
To suggest that we ‘have’ to give condoms because people won’t just stop on their own is selling everyone short. We might as well just give our children liquor and drugs because they’ll just do it anyway…
At some point we need to teach people the consequences of their actions rather than trying to put a band aid on it and calling it ‘solved’.
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