Stephen Harper’s bid to reopen the equal marriage debate is defeated! In their press release, the tireless and now demobilized organization Canadians for Equal Marriage called it a bittersweet victory. “Today does not mark an advance in equality,” they said, “but rather the defeat of an attack against us. We are happy that we can now avoid years of divisive and difficult debate, but we are weary that for over a year now we’ve had to defend our hard-won inclusion in the fabric of Canadian society.”

As I wrote in my dispatches from the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto, one of the problems that really stood out was the ravages of PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which states that organizations receiving PEPFAR dollars cannot align themselves with sex-worker groups. What ensued were several devastating events—one being 17 drop-in centres for prostitutes closed around Bangladesh, rising HIV rates in Uganda directly attributed to this plan and a condom deficit in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the fact that several countries have stepped in to fill the condom void, there are still shortages, and lubricant is also hard to come by and very expensive.

Many amazing people are working their asses off to deal with this situation (check www.pepfarwatch.org), but one thing the average citizen can do is simply send condoms to Africa themselves. Think about it: how many times have you walked into a health clinic or bar bathroom and there are buckets of free rubbers and little packs of lube? How easy would it be for you to grab a handful of each and send them off to the women of, say, Danaya So in Mali?

“Percentages of HIV infections and STIs for Malian sex workers are high,” says Sylvia Sangare of Danaya So, an organization that helps sex workers by offering them health care, professional training, a credit and savings bank, legal aid and literacy skills. “Therefore we are very happy to have relations outside Mali that help the association to progress.” Here is the snail mail: Danaya So, s/c LAKANA SO, B.P. E4134, Mali. Their Web address (French only) is www.danayaso.org.

As for faith-based responses in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, there are so many that are genocidally daft but here’s my favourite quote from Reverend William Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations in response to supporting more progressive and evidence-based prevention plans. “We know that ‘just say no’ didn’t work in the Garden of Eden and it isn’t stopping the spread of HIV today, either in the U.S. or abroad.”

Deliver Us From Evil is a great documentary that seems to have been shuffled away without fanfare, not unlike Father Oliver O’Grady, the rapist priest featured in it. As Amy Berg, the film’s director, writes on the Huffington Post, “The Church played an elaborate shell game for years, moving O’Grady from parish to parish in an effort to avoid liability and responsibility.” Time and again, I am enraged at the hypocrisy of Catholic theocracy weighing in powerfully on universal abstinence programs for teens when, the world over, their priests are molesting children—the estimates made by the film run into the hundred- thousands in recent years in the U.S. alone—and often under the Church’s guardianship. If you see this film on DVD, please rent it.

Rael, the leader of the free loving Raelian Movement wanders onto my radar every once in a while with his progressive sex ideologies unfortunately steeped in creepiness, and this one is a pip. This year, he established Clitoraid (www.clitoraid.org), a Web site that allows you to “adopt” a clitoris on behalf of African women who have had theirs excised at birth. Believe it or not, clitoral reconstruction is a legitimate operation (albeit one with unguaranteed results) and there’s a great doctor in France named Pierre Foldes who performs around 200 of them a year, free, as he believes it is one of the worst crimes against humanity. Leave it to Rael to turn it into something with an aura of sexual opportunism and ridicule.

Have a great New Year’s people, and a huge thanks to all my readers who encourage me to think about sex—and by extension the world—from different angles every single day.

Got any questions for Sasha? Email: POULEDELUXE@YAHOO.COM