From the New York Times.

...But for a conservative Republican administration, any initiative involving AIDS is tricky business. A moral battle, by definition, involves notions of right and wrong. And the same "church folk" who applaud Mr. Bush's compassion may also find themselves uneasy when confronted with its details.

It is one thing to offer live-saving medicines to the dying, quite another to promote AIDS prevention, which involves discussions of multiple sex partners and condoms. This is, after all, the same administration that has insisted that AIDS prevention efforts in the United States stress abstinence until marriage and that banned aid to international family-planning programs if they happened to permit abortions.

Mr. Bush avoided such controversies last June when, instead of offering the kind of far-reaching initiative announced last week, he proposed $500 million to prevent infected mothers in Africa and the Caribbean from passing the virus that causes AIDS on to their babies.

Senator Richard J. Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who has long argued for more money to combat global AIDS, said he was surprised last week to see the White House abandon its focus on mother-to-child transmission, which doesn't involve issues of sexual behavior.

"That was the safest course to follow," Mr. Durbin said. "It was not politically charged. It didn't involve any reference to gay sex or the use of condoms."

The new initiative almost certainly will.

Aimed at 12 African nations, as well as Haiti and Guyana, its goal is to prevent seven million new infections, provide treatment and care for 10 million infected people and orphans, and offer anti-retroviral drugs for two million people. Slightly more than half the money will pay for drugs; 15 percent will pay for treatment and care; and the rest, White House officials say, will go toward prevention, including abstinence education, media campaigns and, yes, condom distribution.

In some respects, the initiative, modeled after a program developed in Uganda, dovetails neatly with Mr. Bush's conservative views. The Ugandan effort relies on what is known as the "ABC approach." The message is: First, abstain. If you can't abstain, be faithful. If you can't be faithful, use a condom.

Edward C. Green, a medical anthropologist at Harvard School of Public Health, has followed the Ugandan program, which began in 1986. He offers the following statistics as evidence that "partner reduction," as he calls it, is the single most effective way of reducing the spread of AIDS.

At the peak of the Ugandan epidemic, in 1991, an estimated 21 percent of Ugandans were infected, as measured among pregnant women. By 1995, 95 percent of Ugandans from age 15 to 49 reported having either no sexual partners in the previous year or just one partner.

By 2001, the infection rate had dropped to 6 percent — a dip experts say reflects a reduction in high-risk behavior, but also the fact that large numbers of people had died.

"The A-word, abstinence, has become a political lightning rod," said Professor Green, whose views have made him a hot property among conservatives in Washington these days. "As soon as my colleagues hear it, they say, 'This is the Bush administration moralizing.' I wish we didn't even have that word in our vocabulary."

This will get an interesting response from certain anti-AIDS groups who place an agenda above actually doing something about the disease. The fact that a vast majority of the AIDS epidemic is behavior-related is something that has been desperately suppressed in many quarters since the epidemic began in the 1980s. That this is true even in Africa is being even more desperately suppressed.

When "moral" approaches are raised, even secular ones, some people take great offense. Apparently they do not want the possibility considered that there might be something wrong with screwing everyone you share a Zip code with.