I came across this article today linked through Joi’s blog and I was immediately filled with rage:
Published on June 16 in the Federal Register, the censorious new CDC guidelines will be mandatory for any organization that does HIV-prevention work and also receives federal funds — whether or not any federal money is directly spent on their programs designed to fight the spread of the epidemic. (The CDC is the principal federal funder of prevention education about HIV and AIDS, and its head is a Bush appointee).
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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.
Always wanting to see both sides of the coin before trying to spend it I searched Google News and found a matching article from the regularly conservative Washington Times:
Proposed changes to the guidelines for giving federal money to AIDS-prevention programs would require approval of educational materials before they are posted on the Internet.
The revisions, issued Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also would increase accountability for AIDS-prevention grant recipients and ensure their compliance with a federal law requiring education materials to “contain medically accurate information” about the effectiveness of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases.
(I’ll come back to that last bit about condoms in a moment)
It appears that the right is saying these restrictions are necessary so that “the CDC demanded more accountability from HIV prevention groups receiving taxpayer dollars”. In particular, they site the San Francisco’s Stop AIDS Project and other groups for having sexually explicit workshops. The funny thing though is that “Stop AIDS Project lost its CDC funding last month”, so these regulations do nothing in that case!!!
(I’d like to put a few of these people through explicit workshops to sit with AIDS victims and their families and see how disturbing they think that is)
What really worries me is the sledge-hammer approach to this policy where a group can have all of it’s federal funding pulled for offering any AIDS-prevention programs, even if those programs are funded through completely different sources. This is very similar to one of Bush’s earliest executive orders that pulled federal funding from any family planning organization that even mentioned abortion.
But back to the condoms. For a while several of my friends have been noticing an interesting trend coming from the Bush administration that is very similar to double-think. For example, statements like “the occupation of Iraq will end on June 30th, the troops will remain indefinitely” seem a little oxy-moronic (more-so if you recall that they specifically said this wasn’t an occupation at the beginning of the war).
What really worries me about this new policy is the mandate for all materials to include information on the “lack of effectiveness of condom use” (this is about the only quote that the two articles have in common). To be sure, abstinence is truly the only way to completely avoid transmission, BUT IT IS A COMPLETELY UNREALISTIC APPROACH. Barring abstinence, condoms and other barrier devices are the single most effective way to prevent the spread of sexually-transmitted HIV…but since “condom education encourages promiscuity,” the Bush administration wants their use and effectiveness to be put in to question by the people who this information can help the most!
Filled…with…rage…
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