The following activities are based on two readings from the Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center: for “a” use the provided site for “b” I have included the article by Zimmerman a. “Condom Use Can Reduce the Spread of AIDS,” by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention http: https://www.cdc.gov/condomeffectiveness/index.html (Links to an external site.) b. “Condom Use Will Increase the Spread of AIDS,” by Anthony Zimmerman Condom Use page 110-113 Anthony Zimmerman 1. Discuss your viewpoint, what side seems to provide the most compelling view? 2. What percentage of condom usage prevents HIV infection, 3. according to the World Health Organization study cited by Zimmerman? What two reasons does the Zimmerman give to support his contention that condom usage will increase the spread of AIDS? 4. In Zimmerman’s opinion, what will lead to the extinction of AIDS? Do you agree? 5. In contrast to Zimmerman’s claim that condoms provide ineffective protection from HIV, the Center for Disease Control states that condoms provide highly effective protection from HIV. How do you account for this difference? 6. Why don’t people use condoms consistently? 7. How do you believe we can improve condom usage, as a society? Article below by Zimmerman CONDOM U SE W ILL INCREASE THE SPREAD OF AIDS Anthony Zimmerman Promotion of condom usage to prevent HIV infection is a short term solution, argues Anthony Zimmerman in the following viewpoint. Zimmerman contends that in the long run, encouraging condom use will actually increase the spread of AIDS because condoms encourage promiscuity, especially among teenagers, and because condoms are not a reliable barrier against HIV infection. Even if they use a condom, promiscuous teens have a high chance of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, he maintains. Zimmerman is a Catholic priest and a frequent contributor to Fidelity , a monthly Catholic magazine. As you read, consider the following questions: I f the question is asked whether the promotion of the use of condoms serves to prevent AIDS, or to boost AIDS, the answer is likely to be: it may brake its spread in the short run; but accelerates its spread in the long run. ONLY SIXTY PERCENT EFFECTIVE If condoms are recommended to people who already are promiscuous, then, yes, condoms may decelerate the spread of AIDS among such a population, but not for long. According to Population Reports: An overall estimate can be drawn from a recent analysis for the World Health Organization (WHO), combining data from nine published studies. This analysis found that condom users face a risk about two-thirds that of non users of developing gonorrhea, trichomoniasis, or chlamydial infection. Condoms offer less protection against STDs, such as herpes simplex, that can cause lesions in places not covered by condoms. . . . Combining data from 10 studies of HIV transmission, the same analysis found a relative risk of about for condom users—less than half as great a risk as for non users. Just as in family planning studies, many of the participants in these studies did not use the condom consistently or, in some cases, correctly. The figures of this WHO study provide small comfort: if condom usage prevents infection only sixty percent compared with non-usage, then it is but a matter of time and multiple intercourses until all condom users—one hundred percent—are infected. It is like putting only four bullets into the Russian roulette pistol with ten receptors, and then pointing the pistol to one’s brain and pulling the trigger continuously until death strikes. CONDOMS INCREASE PROMISCUITY But in the long run promotion of condom usage will only abet and increase the spread of AIDS around the globe, and this for two reasons: 1) Promotion of the condom by those in authority— school teachers, health workers, government agents—tends to increase sexual promiscuity in a population which is not promiscuous, and that includes the majority of adolescents in the world before they achieve sexual maturity. Adolescents are not yet promiscuous during sexual latency. But when those in authority mis-educate them to use the condom, and so break down the natural and cultural barriers against use of sex before marriage, juvenile promiscuity tends to increase geometrically and to completely overwhelm the weak braking action of condoms against AIDS infection. 2) Promotion of the condom and its increased usage induces a false sense of security and pseudoresponsibility, which again tends to multiply sexual encounters beyond the rate it would have in the absence of condom promotion. Herbert Ratner, a pediatrician and editor of Child and Family , maintains: Those who stress condom usage only put the seal of approval on active genital sex. . . . The advocates of the condom seduce our young people into deep waters from which they seldom emerge. Its intensive promotion does more to arouse and stimulate the imagination and encourage genital sex among the young than to curb unprotected sex among the promiscuous. Dispensing condoms from the school will eliminate many of the reasons for teenage restraint and confuse the vital moral message about morality. Distributing condoms in school will therefore cause more teenage promiscuity and more, not fewer STDs including AIDS. “Distribute condoms in school, and you weaken reasons for kids not to have sex,” writes Dr. Paul Cameron, a professional researcher of the spread of AIDS. AIDS IN THE FUTURE Fingers will be pointed in the future at those who seduced our youth today by dispensing condoms in schools to the children. As of now, the prevalent HIV virus in the USA is the type which spreads more easily through sodomitic intercourse among homosexual practitioners, than the African types which spread through heterosexual intercourse. For example, in Washington, ., seventy-nine percent of the AIDS cases were among the homosexuals; by 1991 about 5,500 homosexuals had been infected and 1,705 had died. Read: the ghetto of sodomites is going into extinction, and that could lead to the extinction of AIDS. However, because Planned Parenthood and like-minded promoters of condom usage among school children instigate heterosexual promiscuity among the boys and girls attending schools, a shadow of death already menaces the gates of our schools: the next wave of a mutated HIV virus which spreads easily by heterosexual contact may strike our schools like the atom bombs which devastated Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It will be small comfort for survivors to point fingers at that time and say: “I told you so!” The time to check promotion of condoms in schools, and so to prevent massive death of our youth from AIDS in the future, is now . The time to circle the wagons in parishes, schools, towns and cities is now . THE NEW BLACK DEATH If worse comes to worse—if the HIV subtypes which spread via heterosexual intercourse infect our youth in schools where sex education now promotes promiscuity—we will face a situation not unlike that of the apocalyptic black death which devastated Europe and re-wrote its history in the 14th century. Encyclopedia Britannica ’s entry on the plague reads, “The number of deaths was enormous, reaching in various parts of Europe two-thirds or three-fourths of the population.” What happens now in some villages of Uganda [some of which have three to four funerals per week or have become ghost towns], would become commonplace in cities and towns of the USA where youth has become promiscuous thanks to sex mis-education. The promotion of condoms would perhaps decelerate the first great assault of the epidemic, but only serve to generate total destructive power in the end.