If I Were To Advocate Any Sort Of Abstinence

I'd tell people to abstain from voting for Bush. In yet another big, big reward to the fundamentalists and evangelicals, Bush's CDC head has put out the word: tell people about safe sex, and you lose your federal funding.

In effect, Bush has told young women, gay men, and the entire continent of Africa to piss off. Which is not that unexpected, given the racist, sexist, and homophobic nature of the radical "Christian" right. (Not that all young women are at risk of HIV infection; however, "abstinence-only" nonsense does guarantee more teen pregnancies.) I guess these upright, godly citizens missed that "For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me" and "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" stuff that you find in the Gospel of Matthew. I can see how you'd skip the first book in the New Testament; you guys really wanted to get to the good stuff in, say, Philemon. Oh yeah. Who reads the first chapter in a book, anyway?

But back to the article at hand. It's a damn good read, though you may want to have a shot of whiskey handy to dull the headache you'll have. It's okay--that's empathic cognitive dissonance you're feeling. Someone has to feel it, since it doesn't seem to affect right-wing types.

[T]he 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.

Moreover, the CDC will now take the decisions on which AIDS-fighting educational materials actually work away from those on the frontlines of the combat against the epidemic, and hand them over to political appointees.

This is done by requiring that Policy Review Panels, which each group engaged in HIV prevention must have, can no longer be appointed by that group but must instead be named by state and local health departments. And those panels must then take a vote on every single flier or brochure or other “content” before it is issued.

This means that, under the new regs, political appointees will have a veto and be able to ban anything in those educational materials they deem “obscene” or lacking in anti-condom propaganda. With Republicans controlling a majority of statehouses, and having handed over control of the health departments to folks deemed acceptable to the Christian right and cultural conservatives in many Southern and Midwestern states — and the rest of public-health departments notoriously subservient to political pressure from the state and local legislatures that control their appropriations — anti-condom junk science that plays politics with people’s lives will rule the day.

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).

So what will be left? Why, the abstinence-only ed programs dear to Bush’s heart and to the Christian right. 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).

--snip--

Teaching about condoms doesn’t increase sexual activity and certainly doesn’t increase unprotected sex, but abstinence-only ed does both. For example, a Minnesota Department of Health study of the state’s five-year, abstinence-only program found last year that sexual activity by students taking the program actually doubled, from 5.8 percent to 12.4 percent.

Even more alarming, a study by Columbia University Department of Sociology chairman Peter Bearman of the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents from 12 to 18 years old over a five-year period found unsafe sex much greater among youth who’d signed pledges to abstain from sex until (heterosexual) marriage (a key component of most abstinence only–based education programs, which leave gay kids, who can’t get married in 49 states, to face a lifetime of chastity).

The Columbia study, released last March and financed in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, showed that while 59 percent of teenage males who did not pledge abstinence used a condom during sex, only 40 percent of abstinence-pledging boys used a condom. As Bearman told The New York Times, telling teens “to ‘just say no,’ without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to create greater risk” of HIV and other STDs. In his study, 88 percent of those who’d pledged chastity reported having sex before marriage. The large Bearman study confirms one published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2001, which showed that pent-up sexual desire and failure to realize risk exposure among students in abstinence-only programs made them a third less likely to use condoms than others, even if, on average, they began having sex a year and half later.

All those numbers help explain why the new CDC regs are causing outrage and anguish among leaders in the AIDS community. “Kids are being taught that condoms don’t work, while real life-saving HIV education is being eviscerated across the board,” fumes Sean Strub, founder of POZ, the magazine for the HIV-positive community. And, Strub points out, the Bush administration has hamstrung AIDS organizations, “which are faced with the terrible choice of prioritizing care for existing HIV-positive clients over speaking out against the new CDC rules and risking losing their federal funding.”

There’s only a tiny window of opportunity to try to get the new CDC censorship rules changed before they go into effect (the deadline for public comments is August 16 — they may be e-mailed to HIVComments@cdc.gov or faxed to 404-639-3125.) But when the regs begin to be felt, just watch already-rising AIDS infection rates really soar.

Note that e-mail address--you've got just over a month to tell the Bush CDC that they need to act right.

Would someone explain to the radical religious right that closing your eyes, holding your hands over your ears, and screaming "lalalalalalalala!" isn't going to make AIDS, other STD's, teen pregnancy, or (gasp!) sexual intercourse go away.

The way these abstinence-only advocates think astounds me. Would disbanding the Army lead to world peace? Would eliminating seat belts make automobile accidents disappear? How about getting rid of antibiotics? Would that ensure that we'd have no more bacterial infections in the world? No. Obviously not. But that's the sort of logic abstinence-only types employ, and they never get called on their bullshit.

Oh, and can someone please tell the Log Cabin Republicans to wake up? Please?

Thanks to the guys at Pandagon for this article.