My Worst Fears Come True...

This story provides an example of the depths to which the current Administration is willing to stoop to maintain the support of the Christian right.

"Lethal new regulations from President Bush’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, quietly issued with no fanfare last week, complete the right-wing Republicans’ goal of gutting HIV-prevention education in the United States. In place of effective, disease-preventing safe-sex education, little will soon remain except failed programs that denounce condom use, while teaching abstinence as the only way to prevent the spread of AIDS. And those abstinence-only programs, researchers say, actually increase the risk of contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). "

Two important points are made in this article. 1. Almost all of the many millions of dollars of tax money, ear marked for sex education, is being injected into church groups via Bush's' "faith initiatives"
programs.

This money goes into Christian "faith" groups only. None has gone into Jewish or Muslim groups.

This is the ugliest kind of mass vote buying possible. All across the wide breast and anaemic soul of America, thousands of pulpits have been bought for the Republicans. Christian right mouthpieces, around America, are saying this election is not a political campaign but a "spiritual battle" that can be won only by voting Republican.

These are the same people who scream "Separation of Church and State", when anyone wants to tax their ungodly wealth.

2. The changes in the law and funding regs. that inspired the above linked article, will utterly gut all HIV prevention programs that are not part of the religious based Abstinence-Only doctrine.

To receive federal funding, your publications may not mention condoms, except to say that they do not work. To insure these guidelines are enforced, a politically appointed panel will now vet every leaflet, booklet, and every web site produced by any anti-AIDS group or sex education organization, that gets any Federal funding.

An almost humourous side note from same article: "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."

At the same time: "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."

In plain English, Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage programs are a dismal failure, yet that failure is now the official American Way.

The article, linked here again, is worth a read.