Sorry--this is reposted from my blog at
Three Guys, but I don't have much of a readership yet and I want people to see it. I'm furious.
It's an article from LA Weekly about AIDS education under the Bush administration.
Abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work. So why does the Bush administration want to use it exclusively?
This article is sickening:
These new regs require the censoring of any "content" -- including "pamphlets, brochures, fliers, curricula," "audiovisual materials" and "pictorials (for example, posters and similar educational materials using photographs, slides, drawings or paintings)," as well as "advertising" and Web-based info. They require all such "content" to eliminate anything even vaguely "sexually suggestive" or "obscene" -- like teaching how to use a condom correctly by putting it on a dildo, or even a cucumber. And they demand that all such materials include information on the "lack of effectiveness of condom use" in preventing the spread of HIV and other STDs -- in other words, the Bush administration wants AIDS fighters to tell people: Condoms don't work. This demented exigency flies in the face of every competent medical body's judgment that, in the absence of an HIV-preventing vaccine, the condom is the single most effective tool available to protect someone from getting or spreading the AIDS virus.
and
Under the new regs, it will be impossible even to track the spread of unsafe sexual practices -- because the CDC's politically inspired censorship includes "questionnaires and survey materials" and thus would forbid asking people if they engage in specific sexual acts without protection against HIV. For that too would be "obscene." (Questions about gay kids have already disappeared from the CDC's national Youth Risk Survey after Christian-right pressure).
and
A third of all federal HIV-education money -- some $270 million more in Bush's latest budget -- now goes to abstinence-only programs, almost universally to Christian groups as part of Bush's "faith-based initiatives" (no Jewish or Muslim groups receive any funds). This is a brilliant maneuver -- Bush has turned money earmarked for fighting AIDS into political pork for his Christer base. Much of this money goes to anti-abortion groups masquerading as "women's health" or "crisis-pregnancy" centers. Others receiving such funds engage in religious propaganda -- a federal judge found that Louisiana's federally funded Governor's Program on Abstinence illegally handed out Bibles, staged anti-abortion prayer rallies outside women's clinics, and had students perform Bible-based skits.
Yet Bush's Health and Human Services Department refused demands to audit the Louisiana program, while at the same time conducting repeated harassing audits of effective AIDS-fighting groups that have vigorously protested Bush policies on AIDS, like New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis and San Francisco's Stop AIDS Project.
There're more in the article, including detailed statistical information about what makes abstinence-only education so dangerous.
There's simply no justification for a policy like this. It's a travesty. And lives will be ruined, and people will die, because of it.