When President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief comes up for reauthorization next year, it will probably be a bit battered from some fresh culture-war assaults. The original five-year, $15 billion initiative — unveiled in the president’s 2003 State of the Union address and authorized by a Republican Congress four months later — soon adopted a heavy emphasis on abstinence education and a pledge from U.S. health groups to direct participants out of prostitution and other forms of sex work.

Now, however, liberal advocacy groups are taking aim at the plan. Last month, a coalition of such groups — including the Center for Health and Gender Equity and Advocates for Youth — staged a rally outside the State Department office of U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Mark R. Dybul. The advocacy groups also plan to lobby Congress to ditch the abstinence provision, which takes up one-third of the program’s prevention funding, and to overturn the no-sex-work mandate, which was written into the law by GOP Rep. Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey.

The groups wants Congress “to ensure that U.S. global HIV prevention policy meets the varied life circumstances and reality of those most vulnerable to HIV infection,” says Serra Sippel, acting executive director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity. In lieu of the abstinence-only mandate, Sippel argues, the program should fund more “comprehensive” approaches to AIDS prevention, combining abstinence with broader sex education initiatives in the developing world.

Even though the White House wants to keep the present abstinence-funding formula intact, the advocates say they’re making strides in Congress. Democrat Barbara Leeof California and Republican Christopher Shays of Connecticut introduced a House bill that would eliminate the abstinence funding requirement; California Democrat Dianne Feinsteinand Maine Republican Olympia J. Snowe have a Senate bill proposing the same thing.