An article in the Week in Review section of today’s New York Times implies that the Bush administration’s AIDS initiative may be as much about transferring your tax dollars to churches as it is about reducing transmission of HIV. The article suggests that one preacher who might get a piece of the “faith-based” AIDS action in Africa is Franklin Graham, son of Billy; Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is interviewed in the article and expresses concern about this possibility -- understandably, because, as the Times points out, Graham has said that Islam is a “very evil and wicked religion.”

Is a liaison of Bush and preachers like Franklin Graham really going to pursue an AIDS strategy that takes condom distribution seriously? The Times article says that Uganda’s AIDS prevention plan is a model for Bush’s and “dovetails neatly with Mr. Bush's conservative views,” but one provision of Uganda’s AIDS prevention plan is that the government distributes condoms. I know I’m repeating myself, but regardless of the conventional wisdom, I think a plan that truly resembled Uganda's would horrify Bush's fundamentalist allies, and therefore no such plan will ever be funded by his administration.