Yesterday was World AIDS Day, and my mind is on Africa right now. Not because HIV-AIDS isn't a problem in the United States (it is), or growing in every demographic (it is), but because the scope of the problem in Africa is so terrifying. The life expectancy in Botswana, where 37% of the adult population is HIV-positive, has been reduced from 65 to 35; there are 73 million AIDS orphans in Africa, making up 7% of the African population; and the disease is spreading. HIV-AIDS in Africa is to the 21st century what the bubonic plague in Europe was to the 14th.

If you believe that every life is equally worthwhile, if you believe that we have an obligation to relieve human suffering--if you have an empathetic bone in your body, really--then this is our biggest enemy right now. Not al-Qaeda. Not even war.

Our commitment to fighting this enemy, though still small, increased substantially under the Bush administration. Its increase is, to my astonishment, slowing under Obama. I recognize that these are difficult economic times, but the global AIDS budget makes up such a small percentage of our federal spending that cutting this already small dollar amount, simply because there is less political pressure being put to bear on the issue, is inexcusable.

Bill Clinton called his failure to address the Rwandan genocide--in which 800,000 people were killed--the worst mistake of his presidency, despite the fact that U.S. intervention would have come with a very high financial and human cost. But the Obama administration is throwing away an opportunity to save untold millions of lives at very little relative cost, to improve the United States' reputation abroad (which will reduce terrorist recruitment), and to cement our country's place in history--at the cost of a fraction of one percent of the federal budget.

Addressing AIDS in Africa is our generation's Apollo mission, our preeminent global human rights crisis. Against that backdrop, all other foreign policy concerns, and all other human rights concerns, fade; no dictator could achieve killing, torture, and imprisonment on the scale that AIDS has achieved, and is poised to continue to achieve, in Africa.

This is no time for half-measures. Let President Obama know.

Related: Is Universal Health Care a Human Right?

According to the latest FBI stats, gay men and Jews are more likely to be targeted in reported hate crimes than any other group, per capita. (This information should be taken as very preliminary, because hate crimes are not consistently reported as such.)

Of the 9,691 reported hate crime victims and survivors, 1,145 were targeted for being Jewish. This means that last year, an average Jewish person in the United States had a 1 in 5,990 chance of being the victim or survivor of a reported hate crime.

Approximately 981 victims or survivors were identified as gay men, and another 466 identified as gay or lesbian without a specified gender. (198 were specifically identified as lesbian.) If we assume that half of the non-gender-specified victims of homophobic violence were male (which seems conservative given the ratio of gay male victims and survivors vs. lesbian victims and survivors), then we arrive at a figure of 1,214 reported gay male victims or survivors. If we rely on the traditional estimate of 2 million gay men in the U.S. population, then an average gay man had a 1 in 1,647 chance of being targeted in a reported hate crime last year--higher than any other identifiable group.

But any information regarding the vulnerability of gay men to hate crimes should come with asterisks: Hate crimes are underreported (especially if the victim or survivor is closeted), the estimate on the number of gay men in the general population is almost certainly low (does anyone really believe that only 1 in 75 American men are gay?), and 2008 statistics do not yet reflect crimes motivated by gender identity bias, a category added by the recently-passed Shepard-Byrd Act.

The largest category of hate crime, by far, seems to be racism-based: 3,596 victims or survivors of reported hate crimes in 2008 were targeted because they were black. But because there are 40.6 million African Americans, the odds of being the target of a reported hate crime for being black (1 in 11,374) remain much lower than the odds being the target of a reported hate crime for being gay or Jewish. On the other hand, a good argument could be made that the majority of hate crime incidents against African Americans are not reported--and population estimates of the number of African Americans, unlike estimates of the number of gay men and Jews, are based on rock-solid census data. (Also significant: Many gay men, and approximately 200,000 American Jews, are black.)

Only 792 reported victims or survivors were targeted on the basis of Latino identity, but this statistic is unreliable; undocumented immigrants, who anecdotally seem more likely to be targeted for hate crimes, are least likely to report them due to the increasing complicity of law enforcement agencies in immigration law enforcement.

Related: Does Hate Crime Legislation Threaten Free Speech?

The Stupak abortion-insurance ban may be the biggest problem with the House's draft of the health care reform bill, but it isn't the only problem. Wendy Mink and Dorothy Roberts of StopFamilyViolence.org have identified another area in which the Senate version of the health care bill is superior to the House version. Section 1713 of the House bill would authorize home visits by nurses to investigate mothers at home for various purposes ordinarily associated with social work, not health care. Namely:

(1) Improving maternal or child health and pregnancy outcomes or increasing birth intervals between pregnancies.

(2) Reducing the incidence of child abuse, neglect, and injury, improving family stability (including reduction in the incidence of intimate partner violence), or reducing maternal and child involvement in the criminal justice system.

(3) Increasing economic self-sufficiency, employment advancement, school-readiness, and educational achievement, or reducing dependence on public assistance.

The only thing on this list that a nurse is trained to do is "[i]mproving maternal or child health and pregnancy outcomes..." The rest falls under the heading of social work--and making it part of the health care system is invasive, paternalistic, and an extremely inefficient use of funds.

The Mississippi Department of Human Services receives thousands of real complaints about abuse and neglect of minors and vulnerable adults that it is unable to investigate because the State of Mississippi hasn't hired enough social workers to cover these investigations. Congress could address human services disparities more effectively if it adequately funded social work--but trying to subcontract social work through the health care system, creating a two-tiered system where nurses act like social workers but don't have the power or the training to do the job right, is a recipe for disaster. It's not even an efficient use of funds, when we consider the fact that nurses make substantially more money, on average, than social workers (an average of +/-$42,000/year versus +/-$33,000/year).

We have already learned, via legislation that gives local law enforcement the power to pretend that they can enforce federal immigration law, that public servants are not interchangeable--and that when they are treated as interchangeable, civil rights violations are likely.

Section 1713 should either be revised so that it only addresses health care needs, or stripped from the bill entirely. Take action here.

Related: National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW)

A new resolution submitted to the Republican National Committee would establish a 10-item creed for party members, and expel any candidates who do not agree with at least eight of the items.

Five of the items have direct relevance to civil liberties. #2 states opposition to universal health care; #5 states opposition to citizenship for undocumented immigrants; #8 endorses the Defense of Marriage Act; #9 reinforces the Hyde Amendment and, ambiguously, Stupak-Pitts; and #10, the only arguably positive civil liberties item on the agenda, reaffirms a universal rights interpretation of the Second Amendment.

If enforced, the resolution would effectively ban Joe Lieberman from joining the Republican Party, expel most Republicans in New England's congressional delegation (including senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine), ban Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charlie Crist from running for the U.S. Senate, and limit most party gains to the Deep South. For this reason, I see passage of the resolution as unlikely.

But it would almost certainly be endorsed by the party's base--and with the growing influence of the Club for Growth, Tea Party movement, and a resurgent Religious Right, anything is possible.

Related: What's Wrong with the Republican Party? | Analysis of the Republican Liberty Caucus