The Bush administration’s strong-arm policies have claimed another victim - HIV prevention.
The White House has deleted information about the effectiveness of condoms from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site, perhaps because the administration wants to promote a abstinence-only approach, The Associated Press reported.
The administration needs a wake-up call. People still are having sex.
Abstinence programs should be advocated, but should not be the only safe-sex measure advocated by the government.
Pulling information from a government Web site does a disservice to American citizens because it fails to recognize that people who are engaging in sexual intercourse need to know how to protect themselves.
Claude Allen, deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, told The Associated Press, “We’re looking at ourselves to see what we need to do to be efficient and effective.”
Whether abstinence-only programs are efficient or 100-percent effective is widely debated. Certainly many people still have sex.
The government needs to take a broad-based approach to safe-sex programs to best ensure the safety of the American public.
It’s counterproductive to harass health programs such as Stop AIDS in San Francisco because someone in the Bush administration believes the program might be teaching content that is too sexually explicit.
The inspector general of the department criticized one Stop AIDS program called “Great Sex Workshop” that focuses on reducing the transmission of HIV by exploring “safe, erotic, fun and satisfying” sex.
This program, as well as others like it across the nation, are in place because there is a public need for this type of information. Workshops such as these are not geared toward children, but consenting adults.
If programs are not in place to encourage those having sex to use condoms and other precautions, sexually transmitted diseases surely will increase among Americans.
The Bush administration can be a moral leader if it wants, but we cannot live in the dark when talking about sex.
Too much is at stake if we do.
