We presume based on the Times‘ summary that the Lancet article is rife with pro-homosexual political correctness, as Western elites generally yearn to bring their decadent “First World” attitudes to economically underdeveloped countries that still regard homosexuality as deviant. — Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.com

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The New York Times reports (emphasis added):

Aids: Role of Gay Men in Spreading Virus Is Ignored in Africa, Study Finds

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
New York Times, July 20, 2009

The role of gay sex in the transmission of the virus that causes AIDS in Africa has been long ignored, say the authors of a new study in the medical journal Lancet.

While most transmission of the virus in Africa is heterosexual, 19 recent studies of African men who have sex with men show that they have “considerably higher” infection rates than other adult men in their respective countries, said the authors, who were from Oxford University and research institutions in Ghana and Kenya.

These men also have less access to prevention and care; most African countries have allocated no money to gay men, and homosexual sex is illegal in 31 African countries, in four of which men risk the death penalty.

African male sexual networks overlap with male-female ones, the authors found, since many of the men also report recent sex with women or are married. In three genetic studies the authors compared, gay white men in South Africa had a virus from a type common among gay European and American men, while gay black men in Kenya and Senegal had the type circulating in their country’s black populations.

Gay men face ridicule from their families and health care workers and harassment by the police, the study reported. And because African governments and media aimed very little safe-sex information at gay men, false rumors were common — including rumors that gay sex or anal sex were safer than heterosexual sex.

The Ugandans are a thousand times better off inviting Scott Lively (left) to their country than pro-homosexuality, Christian-hating activists like Wayne (”Anything but Straight”) Besen.

DefendTheFamily.com Alert

The following was sent out March 10 by Scott Lively, founder of Abiding Truth Ministries and its affiliated website, www.defendthefamily.com. It has been fascinating to watch the homosexual activists — and their new, unexpected ally, Warren Throckmorton of Grove City College — seek to make a huge controversy over the illegality of homosexual acts in Uganda and the call at this conference to substitute reparative (ex-”gay”) therapy for incarceration. (Note in bold below how Lively says they distorted his advice to the Ugandans.) Perhaps the “queer” ideologues and their misguided fellow travelers ought to reflect on the massive crisis that legal and celebrated homosexuality has caused here in the United States of America — including hundreds of thousands of premature deaths linked to deviant sexual behavior — before lecturing the poor Ugandans, who are attempting to maintain a pro-Christian-morality public policy (what a concept).

At AFTAH, we preach Christian mercy and have denounced Talibanesque capital punishment for homosexuals in countries like Iran. But we also believe that if states and localities here in America (and governments abroad) wish to ban sodomy, they have every right to do so — notwithstanding polemical U.S. Supreme Court decisions inventing newfangled “constitutional rights” and influenced by inaccurate homosexual activist amicus briefs. We’ll have more on the Throckmorton controversy (see his Christianity-defying, pro-homosexuality 2007 interview quotes HERE) in the coming days, including Lively’s public call on Throckmorton to repent. — Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.com

P.S. I wish Warren would cease his gossipy, online correspondence with activists committed to aberrant, ungodly sexuality and think about the answer to this: How many American men would still be alive today had they never practiced the sin of sodomy?
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Defendthefamily.com Report from Kampala

By Scott Lively

I’m writing from Kampala, Uganda where I am teaching about the “gay” agenda in churches, schools colleges, community groups and in Parliament. My visit here is being treated as an international crisis by the “gay” activists and their media toadies, who are spinning lies in their usual manner, but the Ugandan response has been resoundingly positive.

My week began with a meeting with about fifty members of the Ugandan Christian Lawyers Association on the evening of my arrival, then an address to members of the Parliament on the following morning. There were from fifty to one hundred persons in attendance, including numerous legislators and the Minister of Ethics and Integrity, with whom I enjoyed a personal chat for more than half and hour leading to the event. The centerpiece event was a three-day conference featuring myself, Don Schmierer, author of An Ounce of Prevention and several other books designed to help the families of homosexuals, and Caleb Lee Brundidge of International Healing Foundation, a formerly “gay” African-American man who now leads recovery workshops. It was a paid event, very well attended, mostly by professionals in various fields including education, counseling, government and medicine. Their feedback was extremely favorable.

My part of the conference was a series of three lectures on the final day, lasting most of the day. We gave two seminars at Kampala Pentecostal Church, to a combined total of about 2,000. I shared the platform with the other men the first night, then gave what I think was one of my best motivational sermons ever as the main presenter on the following night. Caleb and I were joint presenters at one of the biggest universities in the city to a crowd of up to 5,000 college students (which began by learning some traditional Ugandan dance moves on stage — to some uproarious laughter from the youths). We spoke to three large groups of secondary school students, a total of maybe 4,000, and did two radio shows, one Christian, one secular, and a one-hour television program on live national television. I did interviews with several newspapers during the week, and had private conversations with several influential leaders. I ended the week with a strategy and brainstorming session with a small group of key Christian activist leaders. All in all it was a highly successful and satisfying campaign.

The Ugandan people are strongly pro-family, and there is a large Christian population which is much more activist minded than that of most western countries. However, the international “gay” movement has devoted a lot of resources to transforming the moral culture from a marriage-based one to one that embraces sexual anarchy. Just as in the U.S. many years ago they are leading with pornography to weaken the moral fiber of the people, and propagandizing the children behind the parents’ backs. On the TV show we exposed a book distributed to schools by UNICEF that normalizes homosexuality to teenagers. (We expect a massive protest by parents, who are mostly not aware that such materials even exist in their country, let alone in their childrens’ classrooms.)

And remember that homosexuality is literally illegal in this country. Imagine how bad things would be if the criminal law were abandoned. By the way, the false accusation against me, now circulating in the US, is that I called on the Ugandan government to force homosexuals into therapy. What I actually said is that the law against homosexuality should be liberalized to give arrestees the choice of therapy instead of imprisonment, similar to the therapy option I chose after being arrested for drunk driving in 1985 (during which time I accepted the Lord and was healed and transformed into a Christian activist).

Uganda is an important target for the “gays” because of it’s internationally-renowned victory over AIDS through abstinence campaigns. It went from having the highest to the lowest disease rates in Africa.

Sadly. there are numerous indications that the “gay” efforts are working. We heard testimonies in our meetings from teachers, pastors and counselors that incidents of homosexuality are on the raise among the youth, including male-on-male rapes in boys boarding schools, and increasing lesbianism in several public schools. It was reported that in at least one of the schools two girls had actually been hired by the underground “gay” movement to recruit other girls at school, resulting in a total of thirteen girls self-identifying as lesbians by the end of the year. There is also a very high incidence of “cross-generational relationships” (i.e. pederasty), so much so that during my stay there was a public-service radio campaign urging young people not to give in to “sugar-daddies.” What happens, according to reports from the youths, is that wealthy white “gays” are coming to Uganda from Europe and America using cash and gifts to lure teenage boys into homosexual relationshi! ps. These “rent boys” then brag to their friends that they too can have money and material things if they offer the same services. Unfortunately, in a poor country like Uganda where many people live on less than $5 per day, it isn’t very expensive to corrupt the young.

On the positive side, my host and ministry partner in Kampala, Stephen Langa, was overjoyed with the results of our efforts and predicted confidently that the coming weeks would see significant improvement in the moral climate of the nation, and a massive increase in pro-family activism in every social sphere. He said that a respected observer of society in Kampala had told him that our campaign was like a nuclear bomb against the “gay” agenda in Uganda. I pray that this, and the predictions, are true.

Now my attention is turned to equipping the activists in Uganda with helpful materials. I have given them permission to make unlimited use of Defeating “Gay” Arguments With Simple Logic, and Seven Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child (a much-esteemed book among the Africans). I still want to send them my remaining stock of about 100 or so copies of Seven Steps, but I didn’t raise any money toward this in my last appeal. If you would like to help, please make a donation at www.defendthefamily.com/help/donate.php.

Please also pray for my ministry (which has come under withering attack in recent weeks) and the Ugandan people.

Your Fellow Servant,

Dr. Scott Lively

There is no precedent in history for such myth-driven “democratization” of a disease, nor for the abominable unfairness in allocating funds away from so many curable illnesses. — Michael Fumento

The full New York Post column by Michael Fumento appears HERE. Emphasis added below:

A Myth that Kills

By Michael Fumento

New York Post, July 3, 2008 –THE Senate is near to passing a massive $50 billion Emergency Plan for HIV/ AIDS Relief — a bill whose priorities are based on myth, just like virtually all anti-AIDS efforts worldwide.

The world’s top AIDS bureaucrat recently admitted the truth: “It is very unlikely that there will be a heterosexual epidemic” outside Africa, Kevin de Cock, director of the World Health Organization, told London’s Independent newspaper. His bosses at the United Nations issued an official denial — but couldn’t truly challenge his science.

The effort to “democratize” AIDS dates back to the mid-1980s, when the media and health officials began a desperate and concerted effort to divert attention and make it seem everyone was at risk. The 1985 Life magazine cover, blaring “NOW NO ONE IS SAFE FROM AIDS” in huge red letters, represents this effort. Surgeon General Everett Koop coined the term “heterosexual AIDS explosion” in 1987, while in 1993 HHS Secretary Donna Shalala told Congress that AIDS may leave “nobody left.”

Even today, the Centers for Disease Control’s HIV/AIDS Web site refuses to acknowledge any difference in the risks of AIDS between anal, vaginal or oral sex.

Peter Piot, now executive director of UNAIDS, warned as late as 1997 that “HIV will cut through Asian populations like a hot knife through cold butter.” UNAIDS’s 2001 estimate had 30 million infected adults in sub-Saharan Africa.

Last year, the UN had to cut that Africa figure by almost half — and drop its Asia number by 38 percent from just the year before. Dr. James Chin, a former top AIDS epidemiologist at the World Health Organization, has long declared the UN figures to be to too high and insists they still are.

In fact, there was never any indication AIDS had or would “break out” from the well-defined risk-behavior groups, as I was writing as far back as 1987 and in my 1990 book “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS.”

I’m no Nostradamus. I merely analyzed public data and studies showing how terribly difficult the disease is to transmit vaginally or orally. But the myths are still the basis for AIDS policy.

The group Fair Allocations in Research compiles statistics on federal spending to fight various diseases, compared to how many Americans each disease kills. Measured that way, we spend 21 times as much on AIDS as cancer — and 78 times what we spend on coronary artery disease, 97 times anti-stroke spending.

Plus, the Ryan White Act mandates taxpayer handouts to HIV/AIDS victims of about $1.2 billion a year. We have no remotely similar program for victims of any other disease.

The same official grotesque distortion holds internationally. Chin charges that the United Nations puts HIV/AIDS victims on a pedestal while other disease victims stay submerged in deadly muck.

Robert England (who heads the charity Health Systems Workshop) recently made the same point in the British Medical Journal: “Although HIV causes 3.7 percent of [worldwide] mortality, it receives 25 percent of international health-care aid.” …

Consider: A 2008 WHO/UNAIDS/UNICEF report demands AIDS drugs for every victim worldwide, requiring spending hikes from $8.1 billion now to $35 billion by 2010. Yet AIDS remains incurable. Conversely, an African with non-resistant tuberculosis is curable with merely $25 of drugs.

“Easily preventable diseases are still killing millions of children each year, while billions of dollars are being squandered annually by AIDS programs . . . who are not at risk,” says Chin. (Yes, the Senate bill funds anti-TB and -malaria programs – but not anything like its anti-AIDS spending.)….

There is no precedent in history for such myth-driven “democratization” of a disease, nor for the abominable unfairness in allocating funds away from so many curable illnesses. Says England: “We have created a monster with too many vested interests and reputations at stake.”

CLICK HERE to read Fumento’s entire New York Post column.

Michael Fumento is director of Education and Research for the American Security Council Foundation in Washington, DC.

…The available statistics show that countries with a large Catholic percentage population, show significantly lower rates of HIV/AIDS infections than countries with mostly non-Catholic populations.

2003 statistics from the World Factbook of the US Central Intelligence Agency, shows Burundi at 62% Catholic with 6% AIDS infection rate. Angola’s population is 38% Roman Catholic and has 3.9% AIDS rate. Ghana is 63% Christian, with in some regions as much as 33% Catholic and has 3.1% AIDS rate. Nigeria, divided almost evenly between the strongly Muslim north and Christian and “animist” south, has 5.4% AIDS rate.

Strongly Christian Uganda continues to frustrate condom-pushing NGO’s by maintaining its abstinence and fidelity AIDS prevention programs and one of the lowest rates of AIDS in Africa, at 4.1%. Uganda’s population is listed by the CIA Factbook as 33% Roman Catholic and 33% Protestant.

Of African countries with low Catholic populations, Botswana is typical with 37.3% AIDS, one of the highest in Africa, and 5% of the total population Catholic. In 2003, Swaziland was shown to have a 38.8% AIDS infection rate and only 20% Catholic population.

Continue reading at LifeSite News…

…Archbishop Akinola, a man whose international reputation has largely been built on his tough stance against homosexuality, has become the spiritual head of 21 conservative churches in the United States. They opted to leave the Episcopal Church over its decision to consecrate an openly gay bishop and allow churches to bless same-sex unions. Among the eight Virginia churches to announce they had joined the archbishop’s fold last week are The Falls Church and Truro Church, two large, historic and wealthy parishes.

In a move attacked by some church leaders as a violation of geographical boundaries, Archbishop Akinola has created an offshoot of his Nigerian church in North America for the discontented Americans. In doing so, he has made himself the kingpin of a remarkable alliance between theological conservatives in North America and the developing world that could tip the power to conservatives in the Anglican Communion, a 77-million member confederation of national churches that trace their roots to the Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

…The 62-year-old son of an illiterate widow, Archbishop Akinola now heads not only Nigeria — the most populous province, or region, in the Anglican Communion, with at least 17 million members — but also the organizations representing the leaders of Anglican provinces in Africa and the developing world. He has also become the most visible advocate for a literal interpretation of Scripture, challenging the traditional Anglican approach of embracing diverse theological viewpoints.

“Why didn’t God make a lion to be a man’s companion?” Archbishop Akinola said at his office here in Abuja. “Why didn’t he make a tree to be a man’s companion? Or better still, why didn’t he make another man to be man’s companion? So even from the creation story, you can see that the mind of God, God’s intention, is for man and woman to be together.”

Archbishop Akinola’s views on homosexuality — that it is an abomination akin to bestiality and pedophilia — are fairly mainstream here…

Other conservative American churches that have split from the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the Anglican Communion, have aligned themselves with other archbishops, in Rwanda, Uganda and several provinces in Latin America — often because they already had ties to these provinces through mission work…

…One of Archbishop Akinola’s principal arguments, often heard from other conservatives as well, is that Christianity in Nigeria, a country where religious violence has killed tens of thousands in the past decade, must guard its flank lest Islam overtake it. “The church is in the midst of Islam,” he said. “Should the church in this country begin to teach that it is appropriate, that it is right to have same sex unions and all that, the church will simply die.”

He supports a bill in Nigeria’s legislature that would make homosexual sex and any public expression of homosexual identity a crime punishable by five years in prison…

Archbishop Akinola said he supported any law that limited marriage to heterosexuals, but declined to say whether he supported the specific provisions criminalizing gay associations. “No bishop in this church will go out and say, ‘This man is gay, put him in jail,’ ” the archbishop said. But, he added, Nigeria has the right to pass such a law if it reflects the country’s values.

Excerpted from Abstinence Alone Protects Fully Against HIV, Ugandan First Lady Tells Youth, by Gudrun Schultz, published Dec 6, 2006 by LifeSite News:

Janet Museveni, First Lady of Uganda, has continued her strong support for the country’s successful abstinence campaign against HIV/AIDS with a statement encouraging youth to live lives of “love, faith and purity,” New Vision reported December 2.

“I would not be caught advising you to take any shortcuts or compromise your lives by using any device invented by man, such as condoms, in order to facilitate any desire to go against God’s clear plan for your life,” Mrs. Museveni told students at the Uganda Christian University, Mukono, for World AIDS Day.

“God’s plan for your life is that you should honour your body because it is His temple.”

Warning the young people that they should not be complacent as HIV infection rates rise, Mrs. Museveni asked them to encourage other students to abstain from premarital sex.

Ugandan President Museveni and his wife introduced a program encouraging sexual abstinence before marriage and fidelity afterwards, in an attempt to combat the scourge of HIV/AIDS.

The program has been harshly condemned by international organizations promoting condom use, but in fact Ugandan HIV transmission rates dropped by as much as 75% in some regions after the program was introduced, down to 5-7% from a high of 18%.

Continue reading at LifeSite News…

…“The bill has been signed by the acting president,” Mukoni Ratshitanga, a spokesman in the president’s office, said.

The law, which allows for civil unions to be solemnised by way of either a marriage or a civil partnership, had been widely opposed by religious groups, conservatives and traditionalists.

The government has defended the new legislation for representing a wider commitment to battle discrimination.

“In breaking with our past … we need to fight and resist all forms of discrimination and prejudice, including homophobia,” Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula told members of Paliarment earlier this month, when the bill was passed by the National Assembly.

Continue reading in Business Day…

“Those who forsake the Law praise the wicked,
but those who keep the Law resist them.
Evil men do not understand justice,
but those who seek the Lord understand it fully.”
–Proverbs 28:4-5

Excerpted from Israeli High Court Orders ‘Gay Marriage’ Recognition, by Michael Foust, published Nov 21, 2006, by Baptist Press:

The land where Jesus once walked soon will recognize “gay marriage.”

In a landmark 6-1 decision, Israel’s Supreme Court Nov. 21 ordered the government to begin recognizing “gay marriages” from other countries, such as Canada. Although the decision doesn’t give homosexual couples the ability to “marry” within Israel’s borders, it nonetheless puts Israel at odds with countries such as Great Britain and the United States, neither of which recognizes foreign “gay marriages.” In fact, the U.S. government doesn’t even recognize “gay marriages” that occur within its borders in Massachusetts, the lone state where it is legal.

Four countries — Canada, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands — have legalized “gay marriage,” and a fifth one, South Africa, is expected to do so within days.

The ruling by the High Court of Justice — the name for Israel’s highest court — gives homosexual couples the same legal benefits as traditional couples, including tax breaks and the ability to adopt, The Jerusalem Post reported. The decision forces the government to register the “marriages” like it does any other marriages.

“We don’t have a Jewish state here. We have Sodom and Gomorrah here,” lawmaker Moshe Gafni told Israel’s Army Radio, according to the Associated Press. “I assume that every sane person in the state of Israel, possibly the entire Jewish world, is shocked, because the significance is … the destruction of the family unit in the state of Israel.”

The lawsuit was brought by five homosexual couples who were “married” in other countries and wanted to have their licenses recognized in Israel. One of the couples was Sefi Bar-Lev, 40, and Yaron Lahav, 29, the Toronto Star reported.

“This is a great step forward. But we are still at the beginning,” Bar-Lev told the Star. “The law in Israel is opening up, but whether you are gay or heterosexual, the rule here is still that unless you want to marry the religious Orthodox way, you must still leave the country to get married. So there is more struggle ahead to win the right to have civil ceremonies in Israel. But today we can see there is momentum in the right direction.”

The United States has a law known as the Defense of Marriage Act preventing the federal government from recognizing “gay marriages.” Homosexual activists hope to see it overturned in court someday, but the major homosexual groups have yet to file suit, saying the legal timing isn’t right.

In Britain, a court ruled in July that the government isn’t required to recognize “gay marriages” from Canada.

The Israeli court ruling was issued nearly two weeks after a “gay pride” parade in Jerusalem was cancelled following pressure from Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders and concern over Islamic terrorist violence. Despite the cancellation, in recent years homosexual activists in Israel have won legal and political battles that activists in America have not. For instance, homosexuals in Israel can serve openly in the military. America’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy prevents such open service, with U.S. military leaders saying open service would harm morale and cohesion.

“[The decision] shows that the homosexual agenda is global,” Peter LaBarbera, president of the conservative organization Americans for Truth, told Baptist Press. “America may have to stand alone, but we stand alone in a lot of things.”

The Israel ruling, LaBarbera said, is another example of how “gay marriage” laws in one locality can have a broad impact.

“It is essential to do everything you can to protect marriage wherever you are — in a state or a nation. You have to take precautionary measures. Here in Illinois, [marriage amendment opponents] would tell us, ‘We already have a law [prohibiting gay marriage],’” said LaBarbera, whose organization is based in the state. “Well, you know full well that they want to change the law or get some sort of court edict to change the law.”

South Africa’s cabinet has approved a bill that would make South Africa the first nation on the African continent to legalize same-sex “marriage”.

Continue reading at LifeSite News…