Fighting a political virus - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 7: The Lure of Fundamentalism
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Bill Bowtell
NOTHING ABOUT THE HISTORY OF HIV/AIDS, OR THE NATURE OF THE VIRUS itself, warrants either fatalism or complacency. The infection can be controlled, wherever governments marshalled the will and resources to contain HIV/AIDS, it was contained. Wherever governments succumbed to political and religious pressures to abandon effective prevention campaigns, or to deprive their populations of the means to protect themselves from infection, HIV and AIDS caseloads spiralled out of control.
In many ways, the fight to contain HIV/AIDS has been a victim of the so-called culture wars – the epic struggle between the political expression of resurgent fundamentalist religion and the values of scientific rationalism. In the US in particular, HIV was seized upon by the combatants in the culture wars to further their political goals with disastrous consequences for the control and suppression of the disease.
In mid-1980s America, science and religion battled for control of the HIV epidemic, and religion won. The architects of the rise to power of the American religious right included Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed. Skilfully using the reach and power of new communications technologies – cable television, call centres and computer-organised databases – over two decades these politicians disguised as preachers built the Christian right into the largest single voting bloc in America. The Christian right was crucial in the Republican presidential election victories of 1980, 1984, 1988 and, above all, in George W. Bush's election in 2000 and 2004.
Perhaps even more importantly, the Christian right's ability to mobilise its core supporters was the major factor in the demolition of Democratic Party supremacy in the American Congress to the point that the Republican Party has virtually permanent effective majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and most state legislatures.
Robertson, Falwell and Reed, and their minions and acolytes, mobilised their voting support by conjuring up a dark and satanic liberal conspiracy that threatened the values of mainstream Americans. They and their institutions profited greatly as they summoned their supporters to arms to repudiate the values of secular, humanist liberalism. From the earliest days of the emergence of the evangelical Christian right, they defined the cultural struggle in terms of abortion, school prayer, the activism of the liberal courts, feminism and, significantly from the point of view of HIV/AIDS control, homosexuality.
The Christian fundamentalist resurgence had its origins in the white southern backlash to the Democratic Party's support for the 1965 Civil Rights Act giving southern blacks the vote. Southern whites deserted the Democrats and switched to the Republicans.
Over the next two decades, the Christian right repaid the Republican Party for giving it a home by remoulding the Republicans in its image. American Christian fundamentalism is thoroughly inculcated with the anti-black racism out of which its political power grew. The world view of the Christian Right was perfectly expressed by Pat Robertson in The New World Order in 1991: "How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age, worshippers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy moneychangers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers and homosexuals are on top?"
Robertson's perspective had not changed 10 years later when he and Falwell discussed the reasons for the al-Qaeda attack in a 700 Club telecast two days after 9/11. Falwell said, "The ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I'll hear from them for this, but throwing God ... successfully with the help of the federal court system ... throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad ... I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularise America ... I point the thing in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen'. Robertson said, "I totally concur, and the problem is we've adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government, and so we're responsible as a free society for what the top people do, and the top people, of course, is the court system."
The political template for the Christian and radical right was best summarised by Pat Buchanan in his 1992 speech to the Republican National Convention that renominated President George H.W. Bush in his ultimately unsuccessful bid for re-election against Bill Clinton. "The agenda Clinton and Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat – that's change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country ... My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so we have to come home, and stand beside him."
LIKE ABORTION, HOMOSEXUALITY WAS HIGH ON THE LIST OF THE SINS committed by the liberal establishment. But with the arrival of HIV/AIDS, homosexuality was swiftly characterised by the Christian right as especially deserving of the punishment of a stern God. For two decades, the Christian right's interpretation of the causes of HIV/AIDS has permeated every level of American government and society. Scientific and empirical evidence about the nature of HIV spread and how to control it has been ignored and disregarded, and its proponents vilified as creatures of the secular, liberal establishment.
In state after state, the political ascendancy of the Christian right has meant that frank HIV education campaigns, condom distribution and needle and syringe exchanges have been curtailed or abandoned. In their place, the Christian right has imposed HIV prevention education campaigns based solely on promoting abstinence from sexual activity and monogamous sex within marriage, and strict enforcement of punitive anti-drug laws to stop needle and syringe sharing.
Internationally, the Christian right exerted its political dominance in the George W. Bush Administration to attempt to bend to its will the policies of the global institutions combating the HIV epidemic. In 2004, the Bush Administration exported to the world the HIV/AIDS containment policies that had been such a spectacular and catastrophic failure within its own borders. In announcing its commitment of $US15 billion ($20 billion) to international HIV/AIDS programs, the Bush Administration made it clear that its aid would be delivered bilaterally and not through multilateral institutions. The bulk of the funding would go to the provision of anti-retroviral drug therapies (and so constitute an indirect subsidy to manufacturers of these therapies) while prevention campaigns would concentrate on sexual abstinence and suppression of drug trafficking as the policy responses to be recommended in the developing world. Failure was immensely rewarded.
Globally, the ascendancy of scientific method, empirical observation and reasoned policy making on HIV/AIDS now faces the same determined adversary that triumphed in the US. Religious fundamentalism poses a direct and immediate threat to the international consensus about how best to contain the epidemic. We must learn from the failure of American scientists and activists to sustain political and public support for effective policies. Empirical evidence about what works and reasoned policy recommendations are sufficient, but by no means necessary, conditions for winning the public policy battle.
The religious right succeeded in America because it did not fight on the same terms and intellectual grounds as science. The religious right spoke in terms of values, morality and the protection of children and families from threat and danger. Science and secular liberalism simply could not match the emotional intensity and political simplicity of the religious right's arguments about HIV/AIDS and its claims about its links to homosexuality.
If science, and its Enlightenment fellow traveller, secular humanism, are to maintain political ascendancy in the fight against HIV/AIDS, much less in such areas as genetic engineering, stem-cell research, cloning and biological sciences, then they will also have to reconnect with the deepest wellsprings of human values and emotions.
Religious fundamentalism must be engaged and defeated at the source of its power, emotional strength and ideological appeal. The American experience of HIV/AIDS demonstrates that whatever their professional achievements, scientists and doctors are lousy politicians. The liberal left has forgotten that politics is not a science but an art.
Art is the distillation of emotion. And politics without emotion, values and ideology cannot succeed. Religious fundamentalism of whatever complexion – Christian, Jewish, Islamic or Hindu – is simply the rebadging of the totalitarian impulse that has plagued all of human existence.
There can, in the end, be no intellectual or political compromise with totalitarian fascism. By its nature, totalitarianism seeks total control, total subservience and total victory while the lovable, but almost terminal, flaw at the heart of liberal humanism is tolerance. But, as 20th-century history demonstrates, totalitarianism and liberalism cannot co-exist.
In this, I agree with Buchanan's analysis. The sooner we understand that we are engaged in a cultural and political war for the future of civilisation, the better. The sooner we rip away the "religious" mask of resurgent totalitarianism and cease to pander to the ludicrous claims of its high priests to represent anyone's will other than their own, the better. The sooner we reject the perverted science of religious totalitarianism, the better.
To triumph over religious totalitarianism, science and liberalism must reassert the values of the Enlightenment remove all priestly influence from politics, confine religion to the churches, synagogues and mosques and strip from these extremists the privileged taxation and other concessions that they have so skilfully abused to promote their political objectives.
The fight to contain the physical virus of HIV is deeply intertwined with the struggle to defeat the political virus of religious totalitarianism. Too many people have already perished because we engaged the physical virus without realising the deadly threat posed by the political one. In the name of those numberless millions who can be saved from HIV infection and avoidable death, the global fight to contain HIV must become part of the larger struggle to engage with, and defeat, religious totalitarianism. ♦