What is it with everybody dying right now? First Bob Hope, Ray Charles, Billy Wilson, now Mitch Hedberg(who we almost went to see last Friday at the Richmond, VA Funny Bone) and even the Pope? It seems like every time you turn on the news someone you’ve heard about has died. Then, of course there are the thousands of people dying in places like Africa from lack of medical care- most of them from AIDS. Now, I’m not a religious man and I wasn’t raised catholic, but I understand that the Pope has the power to influence a lot of people. Pope John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope since the renaissance, and I’ve heard a rumor that someone from Africa may be in the running as the next pope. Perhaps that’s what it would take to finally get medical aid to Africans. Catholicism is actually a fairly common religion there- the product of a bygone era of European imperialism- and yet they were taught by clergy that condom use was a sin. When you’re dying from not only over population and the resulting hunger that it produces but also from a sexually transmitted disease then it simply makes no sense to not use a condom. A campaign of celibacy simply won’t work for that many people- the sex drive is too strong, too ingrained into us by either billions of years of evolution or by God himself. I’m not saying that condoms would be the end of Africa’s problems, but they’re much cheaper to make, distribute, and use then the complex cocktail of anti-HIV drugs that we in privileged countries have access to. With that said, here is a list of things that I’d like to see in the new pope (most of which would save lives):
- Support for contraceptions
- Support for embryonic stem-cell research
- Support for evolution (yeah right)
- Support for genetically-modified foods that can be used to combat hunger and malnourishment
…But I don’t see most of that happening anytime soon.
