To the Editor:
Jay P. Lefkowitz’s tribute to the Bush administration’s AIDS-prevention program glosses over an important element that does not speak to its favor [“AIDS and the President—An Inside Account,” January]. The AIDS policy was in many cases ruled by a commitment to the so-called anti-prostitution pledge, and it denied services to all AIDS organizations that worked with or on behalf of sex workers in developing countries and the rest of the world.
This moralistic approach is impractical when it comes to AIDS treatment and prevention. Since 2003, it has caused hundreds of prevention and treatment organizations to cut services or shut down completely. Brazil alone lost $40 million in funding because it refused to sign the pledge. Bush put conservative politics first, and poor people with AIDS or at risk of contracting it second.
Rebecca Lynn
Austin, Texas
_____________
To the Editor:
Jay P. Lefkowitz’s article mentions an anecdote from 2002 in which a visitor to the White House recalled to President Bush how his father had been part of a delegation that came to Washington in 1943 to plead the cause of Jews trapped in Nazi Europe but was refused an audience by then-President Roosevelt. Had Bush occupied the White House then, the man remarked, the kind of moral clarity that the President had displayed in the war against terrorism might have led to a different outcome for the Jews of Europe.
Mr. Lefkowitz himself has provided a moral source in the Bible for Bush’s reaction to this statement and his subsequent decision to spend billions of dollars to help prevent the spread of AIDS. When Cain is asked by God in Genesis, “Where is your brother Abel?” he responds, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” As Leon Kass observes, this rhetorical question is not simply an attempt to pass the buck. Rather, “to deny responsibility for your brother is, tacitly, to profess indifference to his fate.”
I believe that when the final verdict of history is given concerning
the administration of George W. Bush, it will be clear that he internalized this important biblical lesson and acted, presidentially, in the most positive manner on many vital issues facing America and the world.
Rabbi Haskel Lookstein
Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun
New York City
_____________
Jay P. Lefkowitz writes:
Rebecca Lynn argues that President Bush’s AIDS policy placed “conservative” principles ahead of legitimate health-care objectives in selectively denying treatment to sex workers. This is simply a red herring. The President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) makes clear that nothing in its anti-prostitution clause “shall be construed to preclude” services to prostitutes or victims of sex trafficking, including testing, care and prevention services, and the distribution of condoms.
What the clause does require is that governments receiving American aid agree not to promote sex trafficking. The fact is that men often spread AIDS through rape and prostitution.
And as the UN has documented, the link between the commercial sex industry and the spread of AIDS is especially pernicious in sub-Saharan Africa, where the majority of America’s AIDS-prevention resources is targeted. In Dakar, the capital of Senegal, for instance, more than 27 percent of sex workers were found to be infected with HIV in 2005. As much as a 70 percent infection rate has been found among sex workers in Ethiopia and Zambia.
Ms. Lynn is correct that Brazil lost the opportunity to receive U.S. funding, but this is because it refused to do away with its support for legalized prostitution. The U.S can hardly be faulted for conditioning its dispersal of millions of dollars of aid upon the recipients’ agreement not to promote activities that are demonstrably dangerous and at odds with the very objective at hand.
Not surprisingly, the anti-prostitution provision was included last year in the reauthorization of PEPFAR, which passed with solid bipartisan majorities in both the Senate (80-16) and House (303-115). The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals recently affirmed that the law “does not compel groups to advocate the [U.S.] government’s position on prostitution and sex trafficking; it requires only that if groups wish to receive funds they must communicate the message the government chooses to fund.”
I thank Rabbi Lookstein for his eloquent letter. From his own book Were We Our Brothers’ Keepers? (1985), I learned that FDR was advised not to meet with the 1943 delegation by none other than leading American Jews like Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Judge Samuel Rosenman, the latter of whom said that the petitioners were not representative of the “most thoughtful elements in Jewry.”
Leon Kass’s characterization of Cain’s conduct is applicable to those who had President Roosevelt’s ear at a critical moment in time but abdicated their responsibility to act on behalf of Europe’s beleaguered Jews.
As Rabbi Lookstein appreciates, in fashioning his emergency plan for AIDS relief, President Bush was cognizant of his singular opportunity to take steps that could save the lives of millions, and he acted decisively.
