Under the pretext of wanting to safeguard the human right of self-determination for women around the world, conservative Christian advocates in the US government imposed conditions on the distribution of financial aid in the fight against AIDS in other countries. Primarily, foreign governments and NGOs that wanted to receive such financial aid had to commit themselves to fight prostitution.
No, I am not personally in favor of brothels, street sex workers, or any other form of the organized sex trade. I don’t frequent prostitutes, as they provide a service of inferior quality when compared to sex with a woman who is not a prostitute.
But I am against the US government attaching these strings to the distribution of AIDS aid, because it smacks of typical US political trickery.
Yes, forcing women into prostitution, keeping them in brothels through debt bondage, forcing them to serve customers, or restricting their freedom in any way… all of these are criminal acts that ought to be stopped by the police, with the perpetrators brought to court.
However, laws that deal with such crimes are already in place in every country of the world. But the agenda behind the AIDS aid distribution proposal was not to improve law enforcement in poor countries. If that were their primary concern, there would be stronger leverage through other routes. And apart from that, they would focus on worse crimes, such as murder.
Yes, I hold that murdering a woman is a worse crime than forcing her into prostitution. From forced prostitution, she can be rescued; there is no such redress if she has been murdered.
But the concern of conservative Christian advocates in the US government is not to protect people from the worst crimes. The hidden agenda is to fight sexual freedom. And the US government pursues an anti-sexual agenda not just abroad, but also at home. We can judge this from the fact that, for example, sexual harassment cases receive more attention than, let’s say, armed robbery and murder.
No, I do not advocate sexual harassment. But blowing sexual harassment out of proportion has the net effect of desexualizing society. In a case of doubt, men will not proceed with approaching a potential sexual partner, rather than go ahead and risk a sexual harassment scandal.
And to put the brakes on the sexual expression of men is precisely the hidden agenda of conservative Christian advocates in the US government.
Another example is the extremely tight interpretation in the US of what constitutes rape. Don’t worry. I’m entirely against raping women. However, the tight interpretation of what constitutes rape again has a net effect beyond actual rape cases.
Because it is so easy for women to accuse men of rape, and because it can be so profitable for the women when the accused men are rich, many men in the US, especially when they are rich, now think twice before proceeding with a sexual adventure.
An example of the tight interpretation of rape and date rape laws: Assume a man meets a young woman at a discotheque. They have a few drinks, then head for a hotel room. There they kiss passionately and have exciting foreplay, including oral sex. Of course, all of this doesn’t give the man the right to penetrative sex.
A traditional interpretation would have been that if the woman were against a sexual relationship, she had better not follow the man to the hotel room. And even if she were to follow him to the hotel room, she had better make clear from the beginning that she doesn’t want any sex.
The current tight US interpretation of what constitutes date rape makes rich US men who pursue a playboy lifestyle extremely vulnerable to false accusations and blackmail. What if the woman in the above example, during passionate embraces, says “no need to go inside” but at the same time proceeds with encouraging behavior, such as kissing the man’s neck? What if she even records her words while they are spoken, using a sufficiently sophisticated cell phone (just to have proof)?
Some lawyers have seriously suggested that promiscuous men have their dates sign written forms of consent agreeing to sexual intercourse.
Yes, you can regulate the fun out of sexual relationships, which is precisely what conservative Christian advocates in the US government try to achieve.
Maybe in the not-too-distant future, the US Congress will declare it an offense to use the US Postal Service to solicit extramarital sex. Or it will become a crime to use interstate radio waves for the transmission of explicit profanity. What a great potential to combat Internet pornography!
The anti-sexual conservative Christian advocates in the US government also target free sexual expression in poorer Third World countries. And the pretext is the human rights of women in prostitution.