Today’s experiment is block quotes.

Nicholas Kristof has this to say in a piece called “When Prudishness Costs Lives,” from Poipet, Cambodia:

This is an impoverished, authoritarian, war-ravaged country, but it offers an important lesson for President Bush and American school boards: Don’t fear those lifesaving bits of latex known as condoms.

Cambodia has become one of the world’s few success stories in the struggle against AIDS, and it has achieved that success partly by vigorously promoting condoms. This strategy has saved thousands of lives.

Cambodia has cut the prevalence of H.I.V. in adults from 3 percent in 1997 to about 1.8 percent today. In rural Cambodian towns like this one, billboards and posters promote condoms, and clinics and brothels have buckets of them. Health centers don’t have X-ray machines or oxygen tanks, but they have phalluses to show visitors how to put on condoms.

Here in Poipet, I met a 27-year-old woman with AIDS, Tem Phok. She had been a prostitute in a brothel, so I assumed that that was how she contracted AIDS. “Oh, no,” she said. “I got AIDS later, from my husband,” who has already died.

“In the brothel, I always used condoms,” she said. “But when I was married, I didn’t use a condom. ... A woman with a husband is in much more danger than a girl in a brothel.”

That’s an exaggeration, but she has a point: It doesn’t do much good for American officials to preach abstinence and fidelity in places where the big risk of contracting H.I.V. comes with marriage. In countries with a high prevalence of AIDS, just about the most dangerous thing a woman can do is to marry.

Mr. Bush’s AIDS program, which has greatly increased spending over the levels in the Clinton years, is the single best thing he has done, and is projected to save some nine million lives around the world. That’s a genuine and historic achievement.

But the Bush program has also been undermined by a resistance to condoms. The administration has taken information about condoms off government Web sites, and its AIDS prevention efforts abroad, when aimed at young people, have emphasized abstinence to the exclusion of condoms.

Likewise, in much of the U.S., social conservatives with administration backing have instituted “abstinence only” sex education, so that teens are encouraged to take “virginity pledges” but aren’t given a backup plan.

Careful studies of “abstinence only” programs in the U.S. suggest that they do delay sexual intercourse, but that young people are then less likely to use condoms afterward. The evidence indicates that a balanced approach — encouraging abstinence but also promoting condoms — is far more effective at protecting young people in America or abroad from sexually transmitted infections, including H.I.V.

In the past, social conservatives routinely cited Uganda as proof that it’s best to focus just on abstinence. It’s true that Uganda cut H.I.V. rates significantly, partly by promoting abstinence and fidelity — but also by promoting condoms. More recently, Uganda has been backing away from condoms, with U.S. support, and its H.I.V. prevalence is rising again.

Despite the hostility to condoms in Washington (and at the Vatican), in the field, even conservative missionaries tend to endorse them.

“Why should we be afraid of latex, when we see that it can save lives,” a Catholic nun in Cameroon told me, adding that her clinic hands out large numbers of condoms. She explained: “I just don’t mention that in my reports to the bishop.”

For all the fears that condoms lead to promiscuity, the opposite has been true in Cambodia. Growing condom use has been accompanied by a drop in casual sex (probably because of increased nervousness about AIDS).

Abroad, Washington’s prudishness about condoms is routinely undermined by pragmatic officials, so that at the grass roots in Africa condoms are encouraged much more than Washington probably would like. But that same pragmatism hasn’t reached American schools, particularly in the South.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, which conducts research on reproductive health, the proportion of American adolescents receiving formal instruction in birth control methods has tumbled since the mid-1990s.

One study found that among sexually experienced American adolescents, only 62 percent of girls and 54 percent of boys had been instructed in birth control methods at the time of their first sexual intercourse.

The upshot is that we do a better job using our tax dollars to protect the health and lives of Cambodian prostitutes than we do protecting school kids in Texas.

I've made a mini-documentary from my trip to Cambodia. It looks at sexual slavery in Cambodia and includes an update about the two teenage girls whom I helped free from their brothels three years ago. As always, your comments are most welcome.

Next up, Orlando Patterson, a sociology professor at Harvard, likens Bush to a late-blooming schoolboy in a piece called “God’s Gift?”

One of the more disquieting aspects of the Iraqi occupation is that the president’s final rationale for it is a cherished, though groundless, liberal belief about freedom. As we now know, the war was motivated less by any real evidence of Iraqi involvement with terrorism than by the neoconservatives’ belief that they could stabilize the Middle East by spreading freedom there. Their erroneous assumption was a relic from the liberal past: the doctrine that freedom is a natural part of the human condition.

A disastrously simple-minded argument followed from this: that because freedom is instinctively “written in the hearts” of all peoples, all that is required for its spontaneous flowering in a country that has known only tyranny is the forceful removal of the tyrant and his party.

Once President Bush was beguiled by this argument he began to sound like a late-blooming schoolboy who had just discovered John Locke, the 17th-century founder of liberalism. In his second inaugural speech, Mr. Bush declared “complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom ... because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.” Later an Arab-American audience was told, “No matter what your faith, freedom is God’s gift to every person in every nation.” Another speech more explicitly laid out the neoconservative agenda: “We believe that freedom can advance and change lives in the greater Middle East.”

A basic flaw in the approach of the president and his neoliberal (a k a neoconservative) advisers was their failure to distinguish Western beliefs about freedom from those critical features of it that non-Western peoples were likely to embrace.

Those of us who cherish liberty hold as part of the rhetoric that it is “written in our heart,” an essential part of our humanity. It is among the first civic lessons that we teach our children. But such legitimizing rhetoric should not blind us to the fact that freedom is neither instinctive nor universally desired, and that most of the world’s peoples have found so little need to express it that their indigenous languages did not even have a word for it before Western contact. It is, instead, a distinctive product of Western civilization, crafted through the centuries from its contingent social and political struggles and secular reflections, as well as its religious doctrines and conflicts.

Acknowledging the Western social origins of freedom in no way implies that we abandon the effort to make it universal. We do so, however, not at the point of a gun but by persuasion — through diplomacy, intercultural conversation and public reason, encouraged, where necessary, with material incentives. From this can emerge a global regime wherein freedom is embraced as the best norm and practice for private life and government.

Just such a conversation has been under way since the first signing, in 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations. Several Asian nations — some, like China, rather cynically, and others, like Singapore, with more robust reasoning — have vigorously contested elements of the culture of freedom, especially its individualism, on the grounds that it is inconsistent with the more communal focus of their own cultures. The doctrine of freedom, however, with its own rich communitarian heritage, can easily disarm and even co-opt such arguments.

The good news is that freedom has been steadily carrying the day: nearly all nations now at least proclaim universal human rights as an ideal, though many are yet to put their constitutional commitments to practice. Freedom House’s data show the share of the world’s genuinely free countries increasing from 25 to 46 percent between 1975 and 2005.

The bad news is Iraq. Apart from the horrible toll in American and Iraqi lives, two disastrous consequences seem likely to follow from this debacle. One is the possibility that, by the time America extricates itself, most Iraqis and other Middle Easterners will have come to identify freedom with chaos, deprivation and national humiliation. The other is that most Americans will become so disgusted with foreign engagements that a new insularism will be forced on their leaders in which the last thing that voters would wish to hear is any talk about the global promotion of freedom, whatever “God’s gift” and the “longing of the soul.”

Now let's see...