The sex industry should be legal and regulated, not prohibited.

Bush is holding HIV assistance money hostage to some kind of loyalty oath to share his religious values on the sex industry. The LA Times preaches to the choir against Bush’s moralizing to the world.

But I don’t blame the Bush administration for pandering to its base, I just think Bush is misguided in his evangelizing to the world. The Iraq war has cost us any real moral authority we might have had, for a generation anytway.

Maybe Bush truly belives that loyalty oaths are good things. After all, he pretty much had everyone sign one before they could visit him on the campaign trail.

Oaths are aspirations. But when placed in treaties, then any ALLEGED violation of the oath makes it EASY to withhold the HIV money as a hammer to coerce cooperation. They will be used like weasel words in contracts.

We seem to think of ourselves as the evangelizers of the world, through the government. I guess it’s a good thing for the USA that no Muslim nation happens to be the world’s richest nation, or else WE’d be having to deal with a different sort of loyalty oath forced upon us.

I like the conclusion of this LA Times piece.

A Misguided Anti-Vice Pledge:
Social conservatives in Congress, backed by the Catholic Church and the Christian right, are on a new foray to dictate sexual mores to the rest of the world, at the expense of public health. This time it’s an oath being foisted on U.S. groups working to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic. They will soon be asked to comply with a 2-year-old law dictating that they have “a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking” before they will be considered for federal grants to provide health services overseas.

[SNIP — jump to conclusion]

“If conservatives want to go after prostitution in the Third World, they can fund religious groups to proselytize against it. Interfering in the fight against HIV is a misguided policy that could cost lives.”