Sunday, July 5, 2009

Del Prado's Activist Statement Insults UNAIDS and CARICOM Policy on AIDS and Must be Rejected

Publish date: May 26, 2008
Original location: The Guyana Chronicle; "A Departure From Professional Conduct"; http://www.guyanachronicle.com/ARCHIVES/archive%2026-05-08.html



Dear Editor,

I refer to the news article on comments by the current UNAIDS Country Coordinator for Guyana, Dr. Ruben del Prado (KN 5 22 08) and would appreciate the opportunity to rebut.


The comments reportedly attributed to Dr. Prado are disturbing in their departure from every known standard of professional conduct. Mr. Prado’s professional usefulness, and his integrity as a representative for UNAIDS in Guyana, has obviously been compromised. His statements are a serious violation of cautions in UNAIDS’s own policy brief, and it is clear that he has now become activist. Guyana’s 1998 National Policy adequately addresses discriminatory issues.

I am mindful of the seriousness of these allegations, and will copy this response to CAREC, WHO, PAHO, the CDC, the local Ministry of Health, the CARICOM Secretariat, the Caribbean Council of Churches, and the UN itself. This should, by itself, engineer a generous debate on the latitude Dr Prado took with inferring that his comments reflected official UN policy, since by no stretch of the imagination can it be assumed that the UN or its agencies deliberately advocates and/or supports policies that contradict the available scientific, legal and medical evidence. This would be foolish, even in the pursuit of “human rights”, and we await his strenuous defence of statements to this effect.

First, Dr.Prado is irresponsible in implying that the Yogyakarta Principles in any way reflects the letter and spirit of the UN Charter relative to medically dangerous and socially destructive activities of a sexual nature when the supporting evidence is overwhelming, and must now shoulder an equal irresponsibility in inferring UNAIDS’ bias through his not outlining a countervailing policy of “technical and financial support” to opponents of Sasod who have documented opposing arguments and evidence. A failure to correct this would infer that UNAIDS has chosen sides while the jury is still out, or, worse, that Prado has acted in complete and deliberate disregard of the evidence.

We cite the voluminous and well-articulated law reviews of Regent University’s “Homosexuality, Truth Be Told” law review series (http://www.regent.edu/news/lawreview/articles/14_2editorsnote.doc ) and further show that these strike at the heart of entire sections of the “Yogyagkarta Principles”, and urge the prompt communication of the availability and amount of matching funding available to promote the findings of same law review series.

In advocating the above, we must specifically request Dr. Prado to respond with diligence and intensity to the following allegations of David Lee Mundy, Editor in Chief of the Regent University Law Review series, since we will prove same:

".... So we are left with the unpopular job of setting the record straight. The legal community has a right to know, among other things, that a link exists between homosexuality and the sexual abuse of children, that the American Psychiatric Association was hijacked by homosexual activists, that homosexuality is being marketed to children, that studies claiming that homosexual parenting does not harm children are questionable, that homosexuality is not immutable, and that homosexual advocates are calling for the legalization of pedophilia....”

Secondly, Dr. Prado is facetious and disingenuous in implying that the comments of PAHO’s Dr. Mirta Roses suggest the altogether ridiculous position that any opposition to Same-Sex Attraction Disorders represents “hatred against people with different sexual orientations”. In fact it shows the opposite (commendable professionalism) since no less a person than the very liberal Hon. Mr. Justice Michael Kirby AC, CMG, President of the New South Wales Court Of Appeal, Sydney, Australia, during an address to the First South African Conference on Aids and the Law, 25th June 1992) seems to have been misled when he said: "But the paradox is: if we are serious about the containment of the aids epidemic, we must enter their individual minds and get them to change their behaviour which seems central to them to the definition of their being". The issue, we should remind UNAIDS, care-givers and health workers, should remain “behaviour modification” rather than “accommodation”.

Other activist strategies with some local relevance have been addressed in the online summary “A Response to Vikram Seth’s Open Letter”.

Thirdly, therefore, Prado exhibits an unprecedented degree of recklessness in advocating that “For UNAIDS, it is both a call of duty and an honour to support SASOD’s call for decriminalisation of homosexuality in Guyana”. We can and will ask the UN Secretary-General, as well as his local counterpart at CARICOM, to distance themselves and their organizations from this statement. We have shown that such a step will fly in the face of common sense, and seems to be the product of unusual strains of denial and delusion best described by Dr. Jeffrey Satinover’s book “Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth” (Baker Books, 2002).

It also illustrates that Prado’s fanciful flight from wishful thinking to insipid outburst is based on nothing else than a cruel disregard for public safety and order. Mr. Prado ignores the astonishing evidence in the law review “Child Moleststion and the Homosexual Movement” (http://www.regent.edu/news/lawreview/articles/14_2Baldwin.doc ). Again, Mr. Prado’s professional usefulness, and his integrity as a representative for UNAIDS in Guyana, has obviously been compromised. We have shown CDC figures at page 5 of the online report “An Initial Critique of the National Assessment” (www.guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com/national_assessment.pdf ) that illustrate that disease and child molestation defines the death-style that Prado and SASOD are sworn to protect, and to the extent that the gay population in the USA circa 1990 (1% of the total population) was responsible for more than 50% of the national cases of syphilis and gonorrhoea, he seems to wilfully ignore the fact that we can expect a similarly dramatic and disproportionate effect in the contracting and spread of rectal gonorrhea, gonorrhea of the throat, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, herpes, CMV, urethritis, pediculosis, scabies, venereal warts and intestinal parasites (in addition to the incidence of HIV) in Guyana. What are the facts for Guyana? In the meantime, the Centers for Disease Control advocates that, contrary to popular media reports, MSM’s and bisexuals as a group are the most effective vehicle for the spread of HIV.

We had also shown in the online summary “Supporting ‘Gay Rights’ Laws would court legal disasters” (http://rogerwilli.blogspot.com/2009/06/supporting-gay-rights-laws-would-court.html )

As a matter of principle, then, I call on Dr. Prado to indicate firmly that the views expressed in that article were indicative of his personal opinions only, and in no way reflect official UN Policy, or that of UNAIDS.

Any other position represents an anarchical attempt to seize Guyana’s soverignity, and must be resisted by government and opposition alike.

Yours faithfully
Roger Williams
May 26th 2008

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