Bush’s War on HIV… education
Just to prove the gravity of the things that are slipping under the radar these days, I had to hear from the great security risk blog about Bush’s plan to censor sex-education plans. Wait, not censor, GUT. Not just ignoring condoms, but denouncing them. Read more in the LA Weekly, which says the laws go even further, blocking the vital research that lets us know how people actually get HIV:
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).
The new regulations are in their “comment period” until August 16. So right this minute, send an email (cc: a few hundred friends, too!) and tell the CDC that if they won’t tell kids how important condoms are, we’ll start stopping every teen we see and showing them how to put one on. I mean sure, we’d get arrested, but it seems a small price to pay.
I ask you again–is this our country? From a President who seeks to get credit for fighting AIDS in Africa, the true obscenity is his willingness to help spread it here.
