Fridae

US President George Bush has appointed a fundamentalist Christian, who has called homosexuality a "deathstyle" (as opposed to lifestyle) and runs a Christian AIDS ministry that seeks to "rescue" gays, to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA), the Washington Blade reports.

Jerry Thacker, a Pennsylvania marketing consultant who says he contracted the AIDS virus after his wife was infected through a blood transfusion, is one of the seven new members appointed to PACHA last December. Their daughter also has AIDS.

The Thackers operate a Web site for his ministry, called the Scepter Institute, which he says advocates treating all people with HIV/AIDS with caring and love. But the institute also teaches that gays are sinners.

"We bring people face-to-face with their mortality," he told the Blade. "We call on everyone to change and to be rescued by Christ, because everyone has sinned."

Thacker's appointment has drawn criticism from gay rights and AIDS activists alleging that the move is part of Bush's efforts to include a stronger fundamentalist religious presence on the council.

"We find him frightening," David Smith, spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights group, told the Blade newspaper.

"It's one more piece of evidence that this administration is focusing on ideology and not science when it comes to AIDS."

Among the other appointees to the panel are gay Republican activist David Greer; Rosa Biaggi, director of the AIDS division at the Connecticut Department of Public Health; and Dan Sneed, a gay man from Dallas who serves as executive director of an agency that provides services to the city's gay African-American community.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy G. Thompson will swear the new commission members in next week. The 35-member commission also includes a member of the board of directors of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian advocacy group.

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The group advises the White House on AIDS prevention. Earlier commissions that were set up during the Reagan administration, issued reports strongly critical of the national response to AIDS, and helped to nudge the government and the pharmaceutical industry toward greater action.

"This individual is an extremist ideologue who persecutes and demeans an entire class of people impacted by this disease," said David Smith, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign.

"That type of person has no business advising the president of the United States on how the government should address the epidemic."

"We need to have a scientific-based approach to the problems of HIV-AIDS and not this radical agenda he's pushing," said Carl Schmid, a Republican gay activist who worked on President Bush's 2000 campaign.

Aside from Thacker's anti-gay views, Schmid said his major objection to Thacker is his aggressive lobbying for abstinence-until-marriage education. Thacker is an advocate of the abstinence-only policy currently favoured by the Bush administration, which promotes abstinence as the only sure way to prevent HIV and does not mention condoms as an effective way of preventing HIV.

"Abstinence-until-marriage does not help anyone in the gay community, because we can't get married," he said. "If you are a gay youth, who is addressing your concerns?"

Since 2001, the Bush administration has made abstinence-only programs the cornerstone of their sex education policy in schools that receive federal grants. Educators and students are strictly prohibited from discussing condoms or other forms of birth control.

Co-chairman Louis W. Sullivan, the HHS secretary under President Bush, told the Post he only recently became aware of "the Thacker controversy" and wanted to speak to him before commenting.

"Clearly, this is a virus that affects our general population," he added. "It is clearly not something that is only an issue for the gay community. It is an issue for the heterosexual community."