For example, the first on the list: "No condoms in Africa? Because god said so. Enjoy your AIDS epidemic."
So, you're saying that without "the Church" (not religion) this wouldn't be an issue. So we'll play hypotheticals, but surely without the Church preaching against (and I personally do NOT agree with this decision by the Church) homosexuality, AIDS would have had an even more rapid spread initially? In fact, one can argue that the Church has prevented widespread spread of AIDS in much of the world in it's initial stages.
Half the issue f the spread now (which you mentioned), the other half is why it spread in the first place. And in all honesty, the spread in the first place might have been a lot worse had the Church not have intervened (again, I'm not against homosexuality).
This is spurious logic to the extreme. The issue with AIDS initially was not rate of spread, but knowledge. Nobody knew what GRID was, because it was presenting as a diffuse collection of different diseases, that we now know are a result of AIDS. Your argument that the church, by suppressing homosexuality, was suppressing the spread of AIDS doesn't hold water because it would still have reached the same endpoint of global epidemic. There were no drugs to treat it until 5 years later (and even then they cost $10,000 a patient, a year) and whether it spread quickly or slowly didn't matter, because it was still going to become an epidemic.
There are also the obvious social factors, where the attitude towards homosexuality in the mid 1900s was "it's a disease", meaning that if you were gay you didn't really care about what the Church said. I fail to see how the Church promoting it's anti-gay message could have had a substantial impact on HIV transmission in a segment of society that was being oppressed and thus didn't particularly care.
With respect to condoms in Africa, which is what we're actually talking about, I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that the Church was correct. Uganda generally gets mentioned as the model for AIDS in Africa, since they're one of the few countries that have (previously) had a decrease in incidence. There's a lot of political debate about why, but there's a pretty strong correlation between that and the fact that back in the '90s they were very big on sexual education, condom usage etc. In contrast, they've recently swung the other way and HIV rates are unfortunately going back up (
relevant)
If you're interested, go read The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani (or visit her website of the same name), since it summarizes the HIV in Africa thing pretty well. She also pays particularly attention to PEPFAR, which was an extension of the US Christian ideology that "abstinence is the only moral way" and imposed absurd requirements to get funding to deal with HIV (33% has to be spent on abstinence, refuses to fund nations that don't support abolishing prostitution, refusing to fund needle exchanges etc.)
there would have been more unsafe homosexual practice during that INITIAL period (especially given the quality of contraception at the time - 1960s).
What, latex condoms and the pill?
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