Brazilians have an amazingly enlightened view of human sexuality. By puritanical American standards, it might be called promiscuous or slutty. The Brazilians see nudity and sex as healthy and natural expressions of love and pleasure. Their Carnival brings out thousands of extravagantly undressed men and women (like the senhora to the left) to celebrate. Prostitution is decriminalized and sex workers are protected. They have an open and thriving gay community.
Because of their realistic views on sex, they’ve successfully employed a harm-reduction model in combatting the spread of HIV/AIDS:
(NY Times) Brazil, which spends more than $400 million annually on what is regarded as the most successful AIDS program in the developing world, is taking a pragmatic approach in combating the global epidemic, the experts say, while the United States, increasingly, is not.
One gauge of Brazil’s success in confronting AIDS is to compare the situation here with that of other developing countries, many of which have sent delegations to study the Brazilian program. In 1990, for example, Brazil and South Africa had roughly the same rate of prevalence of H.I.V. among their adult populations, just over 1 percent.
Today, some studies indicate that 20 percent or more of South African adults of reproductive age are infected with H.I.V. or have AIDS, an estimated total of more than 5 million of the country’s 44 million people. In Brazil, in contrast, the rate has dropped nearly by half, and the number of patients being treated has held steady, at about 600,000 out of a total population of 180 million.
But the Brazilian approach is anathema to many conservatives in the United States because it makes use of methods seen as morally objectionable. Brazil not only operates a needle and syringe exchange program for drug addicts but also rejects the Bush administration’s emphasis on abstinence, being faithful and the controlled use of condoms, the so-called ABC approach, in favor of a pragmatism that recognizes that sexual desire can sometimes overwhelm reason.
“Obviously abstinence is the safest way to avoid AIDS,” Dr. Chequer said. “But it’s not viable in an operational sense unless you are proposing that mankind be castrated or genetically altered, and then you would end up with something that is not human but something else altogether.”
“If we increasingly focus the prevention of AIDS along these lines, we are generating carnage, a slaughter,” he said. “It’s not a realistic vision, and the epidemic is going to grow larger and larger.”
All reality-based indicators show that the Brazilian program is working to save lives, while places using the Bush administration’s ABC plan continue to experience a growing HIV/AIDS epidemic. So how does Mr. “Culture of Life” respond to a proven life-saving program? By cutting its purse strings if the Brazilians refuse to preach the puritan line.
Until recently, the condom campaign of the group called Fio da Alma had been partly financed through the United States Agency for International Development. But no longer: rather than comply with an American demand that all foreign recipients of AIDS assistance must explicitly condemn prostitution, Brazil has decided to forgo up to $40 million in American support.
“Our feeling was that the manner in which the USAID funds were consigned would bring harm to our program from the point of view of its scientific credibility, its ethical values and its social commitment,” Pedro Chequer, director of the Brazilian government’s AIDS program, said in an interview in Brasilía. “We must remain faithful to the established principles of the scientific method and not allow theological beliefs and dogma to interfere.”
Peter Laarman, writing in the Huffington Post, wonders alound: in the choice between healing people and condemning them, What Would Jesus Do?
I won’t make friends among the Christianists by pointing out yet again that Jesus neither rejected sexually active contemporaries nor singled them out for special disciplines or abstinence. Apparently celibate himself (although there is no real way of knowing), the Son of Man remained a consummate realist about human sexual behavior. “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone,” etc. Jesus did tell the woman taken in adultery to go a little easy, but he pointedly refused to condemn her. And however much today’s sex-phobic Christianists may want to sanitize it, Jesus notoriously maintained a close and loving friendship with a prostitute or ex-prostitute named Mary Magdalen. This Mary enjoys the honor of being the first Easter Christian: she was the first to mourn on that Sunday and thus became the first to spread the news of an empty tomb.
Modern-day Puritans cannot abide the notion that the Jesus condemned by Pharisees was not actually a Pharisee himself. They hate it that he was not a denouncer of their own stripe — that he was instead what used to be called a latitudinarian. So the New Puritans pretty much ignore the actual Jesus and ignore the spirit of Jesus in their sermons and denunciations.
Progressive evangelical theologian Glen Stassen, of Pasadena’s Fuller Seminary, recently took the trouble to review a whole passel of sermons given by Southern Baptists and found that almost none of them quotes Jesus, no doubt because to do so would undercut their fear-filled Christianism. Instead, these preachers tend to quote the Five Books and the moralistic dicta of the Pauline epistles.
Of course the words Jesus speaks are less eloquent his actions and gestures. Each synoptic gospel pictures the healing action cinematically as the central and compelling thing to note about this young prophet: “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” (Matthew) “That evening, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick and cast out many demons.” (Mark) “As the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them.” (Luke)
The ancient texts don’t say whether relatives were asked to denounce their loved ones’ behavior or repent of their own behavior before they could get restoration and healing. Somehow I don’t think so. Somehow I think Jesus is with the compassionate cariocas on the harm reduction question. That subtle samba music again. So I guess no more U.S. funding for the Nazarene until he gets his values straight and learns to denounce and condemn like any good Christian.
