A cure for AIDS.

My wife and I watched Frontline: The Age of AIDS tonight on PBS. Having been just a child in the '80's when HIV/AIDS came on the scene in the United States, I was amazed at the way the disease was politicized. I will try to say this as sensitively as I can, but with every individual story they told and every protest they showed, I couldn't get past the fact that the disease is completely preventable through simple, common sense practices.

As I understand it, the best way to "cure" AIDS is to not get it.

According to an article on the program's website, President Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) allocated $15 billion to AIDS prevention, treatment, and care. The program requires that 20% of its funds go toward prevention, with a third of that money going toward abstinence-until-marriage education. Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas points out the obvious, that abstinence is an extremely successful technique to prevent the contraction of HIV. The critics claim that this approach forces morality on people, but Brownback counters that we can "take all morality out of it, and then let's just deal with it on a biological basis." He's got a point.

We tell kids not to drink and drive. Why? Because it is dangerous and can destroy their lives, or even kill them. We tell kids not to smoke because they could get cancer and die. But why would anyone think that telling kids to not have sex would be a problem? According to the CDC, more than 425,000 Americans were living with AIDS. According to the statistics, the majority of the people who have the disease contracted it through sexual contact.

I can't remember where I heard it, but someone has said that one singe generation of monogamy would completely wipe out all sexually transmitted diseases. Think of it… billions and billions of dollars are being devoted to diseases that we already have a cure for.

As a Christian, I think that we should be leading the charge in compassion and care for people with HIV/AIDS. The Church should be known for its kindness toward the people who have this disease, regardless of the social stigmas attached to it or the lifestyles of many of its victims. However, I think we also need to push for unbiased, unpoliticized education about the risks associated with the behaviors that would expose a person to AIDS.