Government leaders press the case for condoms

Background briefing. Blair and Brown polish their anti-Catholic credentials, with attacks on Church teaching and insistence on sex education.

From CFNews: Prime Minister Tony Blair urges church leaders to 'face up to reality' and drop a ban on condoms.
In an interview to mark World Aids Day, the Prime Minister said people should be able to use protection to save lives. Mr Blair, speaking to MTV, said: 'I think if all the churches and religious organisations were facing up to reality, it would be better. The danger is if we have a sort of blanket ban coming from religious hierarchy saying it's wrong to do it, then you discourage people from doing it in circumstances where they need to protect their own lives. The danger of them not doing so is that you get people who are sexually active and sometimes in circumstances where they may be forced into the sex trade, for example'. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown has told The Independent that 'We must also improve sex education, promote safe sex and improve access to funding for proper protection against sexual infection. Although Aids funding has increased dramatically in recent years, it is a fact that funding for condoms has not kept pace with the need.'. The Government's Select Committee on International Development (Second Report): 'Questions of morality are not the issue: what is important is finding the most effective way to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS' (Emphasis added). Catechism of the Catholic Church : 'The innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to positive refusal to be open to life but also to falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality.... The difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle . involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality.