The secular liberal democratic government of the United States, which governs an advanced industrial country in the global North, fails to provide such essential services as free contraceptives and scientific sex education, let alone a sex education that promotes sexual pleasure, which the Islamic Republic of Iran makes available. The secular liberal democratic government of South Africa, whose constitution was the first in the world to prohibit unfair discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, fired Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, in favor of its long-standing AIDS denialism. And so on.
The idea that secular liberal democracy is always better than religious governments at least on the gender and sexuality front in all respects does not seem to me to be true. It really depends on the contents of governments' programs, not on whether governments are secular or religious.
<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/dohrn160907.html> Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge and the Future of AIDS Policy in South Africa by Jennifer Dohrn
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President Mbeki has held a public stance that fostered the denial of the existence of the HIV virus, and his Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has tightly controlled and limited the ability of the Department of Health to mobilize the health care system against this epidemic. Promoting nutritional supplements as beneficial to AIDS treatment and labeling antiretroviral medications as "poisons," Manto is angrily called "Beetroot" (a vegetable she believes is curative) at funerals as elders bury their children who are dying at alarming rates from AIDS. The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), launched under the leadership of Zachie Achmat in December 1998, has been at the center of mobilizing a national campaign, through protests, court actions, and a community-based treatment literacy campaign to educate everyone about AIDS. It has been largely the efforts of TAC that have forced the government to initiate treatments to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV and then the national roll-out of antiretroviral medications. Their members have been persecuted, jailed, and died, yet they remain relentless and dedicated.
In the fall of 2006, Manto became seriously ill, and the Deputy Minister Madlala-Routledge, a long-time activist and fighter for appropriate AIDS national policy, began her uphill struggle to reroute the AIDS strategy in South Africa. Achmat called her recognition of TAC a "defining moment" for South African AIDS policy. There has been a sense that the tide could indeed be turned with an aggressive national protocol for prevention and access to treatment. This tragically was short-lived, as Madlala-Routledge was fired from her position the end of July this year, and Manto is back in full swing. -- Yoshie