Lawmakers Call on Rice to End Ideological Attacks on Funding for AIDS Programs
(Washington, DC) – U.S. Representatives Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), Henry Waxman (D-CA), Tom Lantos (D-CA), Nita Lowey (D-NY), Betty McCollum (D-MN), and U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today to protest attacks by right wing organizations and Republican members of Congress on effective programs to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS and to call for a funding process based on merit and science, not ideology.
“By attacking organizations with a proven track record of results, the radical right's coordinated campaign of false innuendo is quite literally hurting the people we are trying to help,” said Lee. “Our foreign aid programs should not be held hostage to an ideology that opposes the use of sound science. We are fighting a global pandemic, and there is no room in that fight for culture wars or people trying to score political points with their base.”
The nine page letter documents efforts, led by the right wing group Focus on the Family and Republican members of Congress, to eliminate funding for HIV/AIDS programs based on ideological objections to their activities.
The letter highlights a series of Congressional briefings, public hearings and letters to the Bush administration in which conservatives attack condom education, outreach to commercial sex workers and programs they say discriminate against faith-based organizations and oppose abstinence education.
Some of the attacks were overtly ideological in nature, while others relied on factually incorrect assertions. For example, one section of an invitation-only Congressional briefing given by Focus on the Family was dedicated to the assertion that a certain USAID employee was homosexual. In another instance, a letter from Representative Chris Smith to the Bush administration claimed that an article in the Bangkok Post had criticized the pro-prostitution agenda of one program, when in fact the program does not support the legalization of prostitution, nor was it criticized in the article cited.
According to Lee and the other lawmakers the programs targeted by conservatives on ideological grounds are critical components of an evidence-based approach to combating the deadly disease that has been endorsed by the scientific community, elected officials, religious leaders and even the Bush administration’s Global AIDS Coordinator.
The coordinated attacks appear to have had some success. For example, the CORE Initiative, a USAID program that has partnered with nearly 200 faith- and community-based organizations in fighting the spread of HIV and caring for those living with AIDS, was terminated after Senator Rick Santorum described CORE partners as having “a solid record of anti-abstinence, pro-prostitution, and anti-American activities” in a letter to the Bush administration.
Lee, who through her legislative work to address the AIDS pandemic in the United States and abroad has emerged as a leader in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, is currently spearheading a budget letter to the President, signed by 67 members of Congress, requesting $7.54 billion to fund US foreign assistance programs to address HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria in fiscal year 2007, including $1.2 billion for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
The letter comes on the heels of an announced restructuring within the State Department to align the distribution of US foreign aid by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) according to the foreign policy priorities of the Bush administration, a move that has raised concerns that long term USAID development goals may be put aside in favor of short term political interests.
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