It’s completely fair for the media to reproduce nasty anti-pope quotes from secular leftists in opposition to the Catholic Church’s opposition to artificial contraception. What’s not fair is how these promoters of illicit sex (for what does condom distribution encourage and enable?) are presented as the Voice of Scientific Detachment, as “health advocates” or “AIDS advocates.” There is no suggestion that their spitting out their annoyance at “dogma” tags them as sounding more emotional and ideological than scientific. From AP:

Rebecca Hodes with the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa said if the pope is serious about preventing new HIV infections, he will focus on promoting wide access to condoms and spreading information on how best to use them. “Instead, his opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans,” said Hodes, director of policy, communication and research for the action campaign.

There is nothing more tiresome and mudslinging than suggesting that a religious opposition to condoms is opposed to “saving lives.” There is nothing more permissive and unscientific than finding a man in South Africa who’s been recklessly promiscuous with numerous sexual partners and blaming his lack of self-control on the pope. But this woman is a hero to secularists: “So Rebecca Hodes knows that a live African is better than a dead Catholic. To me she’s worth more to the African continent than a busload of Popes.”

So what is the “Treatment Action Campaign”? It would be a mistake to think it’s a non-ideological health group, as AP would have you believe. The Guardian profiled TAC’s founder:

Zackie Achmat was 14 when he took his first direct action.
It was 1976, and he felt fellow pupils at his “coloured”, or mixed-race, school (where he was sent because of his Malaysian and Muslim roots) were not sufficiently supportive of the anti-apartheid education boycott spreading from the black townships around Johannesburg. So he set fire to the school and nobody went to classes….
Achmat was radicalised by his communist father and shop-steward mother in his youth. He was sent to prison for three months after setting the school on fire and, by the time he was 18, had been in and out of jail four times for political activities.
With liberation from apartheid — and about the time he discovered he was HIV-positive — Achmat founded the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality which, in the early 1990s, played a central role in ensuring that Calvinist laws banning gay and lesbian sex were overturned in the new constitution.
Its guarantees of equality became the levers for overturning laws banning sodomy and requiring the government to recognise same-sex marriages.

“AIDS advocates” aren’t simply nonpartisan life-savers. The AIDS lobby and its media allies are often trying to set moral policy instead of medical policy. As Ray Suarez explained for PBS from South Africa: “Policymakers high up on the country’s organizational chart struggle to find a message that strips the discussion of AIDS of shame, judgment and guilt. They openly strive for HIV status to become an unremarkable medical fact as easily produced as a cholesterol level or blood pressure.”

Remove all concept of judgment or guilt from AIDS transmitters, and you’re left blaming the pope instead of the Typhoid Mary and Mark who spread the virus. Now who sounds like they’re promoting denial instead of hard facts?