Elevating Discourse – AIDS and Abstinence

On the subject of useless arguments:

I am sick of hearing about the Pope and AIDS.

This came up on the previously-mentioned episode of Q&A I watched tonight. Again the discussion went approximately along the lines of:

Step 1: 98% of the group jeer at the remarks of the Pope

Step 2: Someone from the crowd stands up and gives a short speech criticising the Pope’s actions, to loud applause.

Step 3: A question is almost jokingly referred to a Catholic member of the panel (no Christian thinkers, just a pollie and a rogue priest), who makes a further joke to show they “get” it, and then offers half an answer, almost tongue in cheek itself.

All of this is clearly worse than useless, and extremely unenlightening.

I don’t want to talk about the Pope. I want to talk about AIDS. How do we fight it, and who is doing the fighting?

If the Catholic church refuses to participate in public education programs, that is their prerogative.

Why are we angry? Do we wish to use the Catholic infrastructure for public health education? If so, arguments convincing to Catholics need to be made. It’s not hard to see that pure utility isn’t going to work as an argument to an organisation with a clear moral mandate. Arguments which address Catholic sensibilities and reflect Catholic internal politics are needed if Rome is to be convinced.

Do we wish the Catholic church to stop encouraging abstinence? encourage away, but why is it our right to tell them what to teach? Since when have we developed a monopoly on truth? I agree that the scientific claims made by the Pope are clearly wrong, but when has the Catholic church been behelden to preach Science’s dogma?

Beyond all this- is the utilisation of Catholic infrastructure, or even the impact of contrary Catholic teaching on more mainstram public health education, worth spending so much time on in addressing the AIDS epidemic? I would guess not.

I think the real problem here is that we tend to  look for “bad guys”. If we can find people with power who believe differently to us about addressing the issue, solutions all of a sudden seem political. “If we could only stop the course of the disease!” becomes “If only those Catholics would get on board with our programs!”

Why don’t we accept that the Catholic church will take a different opinion to the broader public-health community, and leave it at that. Their mandate is the spiritual health of the people under their care. Like me, you may disagree with some or all of their teaching, but you cannot expect across-the-board subscription to some sort of humanist/rationalist approach to the world and its problems. 

However rational and humane it may seem.

Am I making sense? Please comment it up – I want to hear your thoughts on this.

ANB

Check out Erin’s excellent post. I watched Q&A tonight because a friend was on, and was overwhelmed with frustration at the lack of thoughtful and engaging debate.

The producers seemed to have invited cranks and politicos on in an attempt to “make good television”, which is not what such shows should be about. It was  a live forum, and with an articulate and interested audience and excellent live web integration.  

Every opportunity for interesting discussion was then squandered on obfuscatory political non-answers, low-quality humour, and the voicing of the kind of uninformed, sound-bitey arguments that are new to almost no-one.

We have a publicly-funded, tightly-regulated national broadcaster and still we cannot get a good issue-discussion program on television. The best at the moment is SBS’s Insight,  which itself suffers from lack of focus and the tendency to give polemics too much airtime.

The future is clearly with the bloggers. That is why Erin’s post is so important.