Tomorrow morning, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will meet to mark up legislation providing roughly $50 billion over the next five years to combat AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in Africa. Among the virtues of the bill, according to aid workers and clinicians, is the elimination of a current law requiring at least one-third of all federal AIDS prevention dollars to Africa to go toward abstinence programs.

Not to be pushed around by experts, however, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) has plans to stick the abstinence requirement back in, according to several accounts.

No word yet whether Vitter plans to make his move in the committee or on the Senate floor (or even if he will go through with it at all). But as some have pointed out, the irony surrounding Vitter’s abstinence stance is enormous, given his history of sex-soaked scandal. Here’s Scott Swenson, editor of RH Reality Check (and HIV patient), writing this morning:

Sen. Vitter, not exactly a model for abstinence, or being faithful, has the audacity to put his hypocritical ideology ahead of evidence-based public health strategies that tell us abstinence-only should be removed from [the bill]. He puts ideology ahead of his own reality in the ultimate paternalistic perversion of “do as I say, not as I do.”

The bill is the result of a delicate bipartisan compromise, which took some work to craft. As Michael Gerson, Washington Post commentator and former George W. Bush speechwriter, wrote this morning:

Earlier this year, the … compromise seemed to be unraveling. Some congressional Democrats pushed for more expansive family planning within AIDS programs — which a number of conservatives interpreted as a push for abortion rights. Some congressional Republicans seemed primed for a culture-war battle, with the people of Africa as the main victims.
Instead, we saw a last-minute, late-night outbreak of sanity. Negotiators chose, once again, to skirt the abortion issue. Republicans kept a provision that prohibits funding for groups that support the legalization of prostitution. Democrats achieved an $11 billion increase in AIDS funding above the president’s request; they also put an end to the 33 percent set-aside in [the bill's] prevention funding for abstinence and faithfulness programs.

Whether the compromise endures the amendment process has yet to be seen.