by hilzoy
I’m a little late on this one, but here’s ABC’s The Blotter (via TPM):
“Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias submitted his resignation Friday, one day after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation.
Tobias, 65, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had previously served as the ambassador for the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief.
A State Department press release late Friday afternoon said only he was leaving for “personal reasons.”
On Thursday, Tobias told ABC News he had several times called the “Pamela Martin and Associates” escort service “to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.” Tobias, who is married, said there had been “no sex,” and that recently he had been using another service “with Central Americans” to provide massages.”
Ah, yes. Whenever I want to not have sex, I hire an escort service. It gets pretty expensive, what with all the time I spend not having sex, and the people at the dry cleaners look at me strangely when I show up to pick up my clothes, not having sex while accompanied by a bevy of hunky “Central Americans” (whose green cards I naturally check first), but hey: it’s my life, and if I want to not have sex while paying not to have it, that’s my business.
Via AmericaBlog, the Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report from April 22, 2004:
“U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias on Thursday in Berlin defended the use of prevention programs that emphasize sexual abstinence in African and Caribbean countries that are set to receive assistance through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, Agence France-Presse reports (Agence France-Presse, 4/22). (…) Tobias, who was in Berlin for the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS’ 2004 Awards for Business Excellence, said that promoting abstinence and monogamy are “far more effective” than distributing condoms for preventing the spread of HIV, according to Agence France-Presse. “Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective,” Tobias said, adding, “It’s been the principal prevention device for the last 20 years, and I think one needs only to look at what’s happening with the infection rates in the world to recognize that has not been working.” PEPFAR has been criticized by AIDS advocates for placing “false hopes” on abstinence and monogamy prevention programs, according to Agence France-Presse.”
“Ambassador Randall Tobias, who serves as Bush’s global AIDS czar, issued written guidelines in January that spell out the administration’s agenda. Groups that receive U.S. funding, Tobias warned, should not target youth with messages that present abstinence and condoms as “equally viable, alternative choices.” Zeitz of Global AIDS Alliance has dubbed the document “Vomitus Maximus.” He says, “I get physically ill when I read it. It has the biggest influence over how people are acting in the field.” And under a proposal being pushed by Republicans on Capitol Hill, Tobias would be given the power to divert even more money toward promoting abstinence. “All Republicans can think about is making Africans abstinent and monogamous,” says a Democratic staffer involved in the negotiations. “It’s the crassest form of international social engineering you could imagine.”
The anti-condom order issued by Tobias is already having a chilling effect among the groups most effective at combating AIDS. Population Services International, a major U.S. contractor with years of experience in HIV prevention, says it can no longer promote condoms to youth in Uganda, Zambia and Namibia because of PEPFAR rules. “That’s worrisome,” says PSI spokesman David Olson. “The evidence shows they’re having sex. You can disapprove of that, but you can’t deny it’s happening.””
That, no doubt, is why Tobias was so busy abstaining from sex with his escorts: he was putting his own body on the line in his efforts to prevent the spread of HIV.
A pity he forgot about one other part of the policies he was in charge of implementing:
“In passing the Bush global AIDS initiative, Congress included a provision requiring that all organizations receiving federal AIDS funds to have a policy “explicitly opposing” prostitution and sex trafficking in order to be eligible for U.S. funds (The Guttmacher Institute, 2003). The policy was originally applied to foreign organizations and was later broadened to a requirement of U.S. organizations receiving federal AIDS funds (Kohn, 2005). As with other ideology-based policies examined here, the implementation of the anti-prostitution pledge has resulted in a distorted environment that sacrifices lifesaving services and places ideology over people’s lives.
As a result of the policy, groups such as Population Services International (PSI), which runs HIV prevention programs targeting sex workers in bars and brothels in Central America, appear to be losing federal support (Kohn, 2005). Last year PSI’s program made contact with 422,000 people in high-risk groups and has demonstrated a significant decrease in HIV infections among sex workers. An official with the UNAIDS office cites the program as one of the best in the region. Other organizations, such as DKT International, refused to sign the clause on free speech grounds and as a result lost funding (Kohn, 2005; Phillips, 2005). DKT International has subsequently filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government. And the country of Brazil has refused $40 million in U.S. HIV/AIDS grants because they are conditioned on the pledge requirement (Phillips, 2005).
The pledge also is having a chilling effect, as groups wary of losing precious funds cut activities that are aimed at assisting sex workers. The ambiguity of the policy, which, for example, does not clearly define what it means by “prostitution,” exacerbates the problem. As a result, for fear of losing funding, nongovernmental organizations in Cambodia discontinued plans to provide English language classes to sex workers — classes which would potentially open opportunities for alternative income generation (CHANGE, 2005b). By forcing service providers to take a position condemning the very people they are seeking to help, the anti-prostitution pledge is yet another example of the Bush administration’s fervent commitment to serving the demands of its social conservative base. And it does so at the cost of the lives of those it purports to help through its HIV/AIDS funding and programs.”
Opposition to prostitution: it’s fine to impose it on others, but don’t ask the members of the Bush administration who defend and implement this policy to practice it themselves.
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While I’m at it …
