The Bush administration has issued an order requiring groups fighting AIDS to publicly denounce prostitution as a condition for receiving federal funds. The impulse is understandable, but the order harms the important work the administration is funding.

Of course, most people oppose prostitution. But in many communities prostitutes are what epidemiologists call a chief “core transmitter” of the AIDS virus. If a community has so far been spared from the disease, a single sailor or truck driver can arrive, carrying the AIDS virus and looking for sex. He (or possibly she) can transmit the virus to the prostitute (whether male or female) and the prostitute can then pass it along to anyone else in the community who has sex with the prostitute.

Groups fighting AIDS know that the solution is to persuade prostitutes to use condoms. But how can these groups approach prostitutes and seek their cooperation when they have been required to vilify them to satisfy the political interests of the Bush administration?

Brazil recently gave up $40 million in U.S. support for its successful $400 million-a-year campaign against AIDS rather than comply with the U.S. demand that it condemn prostitution. The New York Times quoted the head of the Brazilian program as saying, “We must remain faithful to the established principles of the scientific method and not allow theological beliefs to interfere.”

The requirement for an anti-prostitution pledge was included in a 2003 law, applied first only to foreign aid recipients but recently also to U.S. non-governmental organizations, The move is part of a Bush administration policy of discouraging sex-trafficking and the use of condoms as promoting sexual promiscuity. It also opposes programs providing clean needles to curtail the spread of AIDS by needle sharing by intravenous drug users, another core transmitter in Myanmar and southwestern China.

An American charity providing AIDS prevention services to prostitutes in poor countries, DKT International, has filed suit in federal court in Washington against the U.S. Agency for International Development over its rejection of grant applications for its refusal to sign the pledge.

The organization argued that having to support the Bush administration’s “political viewpoint on prostitution” violates its First Amendment free speech rights. The nonprofit group, which sold 390 million discount condoms last year in 11 countries to fight AIDS, receives 16 percent of its $50 million annual operating budget from the U.S. government.

So the U.S. courts could conceivably save the Bush administration from its own foolishness in catering to right-wing religious pressure. Moralistic policies should not be allowed to hamper the worldwide campaign against this deadly plague.