ARE GEORGE W. BUSH's POLICIES KILLING TEXAS CHILDREN?

"There ought to be limits
to freedom..."

— George W. Bush,
commenting on the website
www.gwbush.com

QUOTE OF THE MONTH: "If you don't think it's a gamble to put a man in the White House who believes we should have guns in church, who thinks the Taliban is a rock band, who was such a failure as a businessman that his company was nicknamed "El-Busto," who wants to turn our Social Security system into a Wall Street boiler room, who can't name a single thing he disagrees with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on, who smeared a bona fide hero named John McCain, and whose principle policy proposal is to give America's surplus to the idle rich in the form of a $1.3 trillion tax cut, you're either nuts or a Republican."

... Equal Time co-host Paul Begala, shooting the bull.

IS GEORGE DUBYA'S POLICIES ON SEX EDUCATION KILLING TEXAS KIDS OR AT THE VERY LEAST HELPING THE SPREAD OF HIV AND DISEASE?

Abstinence only is becoming the dominant sex message in Texas.  Public schools have no mandated sex education and the state education department's attitude toward condom distribution is "no way, no way in hell, ever," says Jean Gibson, spokeswoman for the state Health Department's HIV/STD prevention bureau.   Shortly after Bush took office in 1995 the Legislature rewrote state laws to require state sex education classes to "present abstinence as the preferred behavior" and to teach that condom use wasn't necessarily effective.

Bush appeared at least twice at abstinence rallies with McIlhaney in the past two years, and publicly frowns on condom use.  In March, when a new Texas law exempting over-the-counter medication from taxes turned out to make condoms tax-free too, he said through a spokesman at the time that he "never wanted condoms to be exempt."

"The governor supports abstinence education and believes it is an important part of encouraging young people to be responsible," Bush spokesman Ray Sullivan said Thursday when asked to characterize Bush's position on sex education.  " He calls for increasing abstinence funding at the national level to at least the level of contraception funding."  When asked what abstinence education has done for Texas teens, Sullivan said teen births in Texas were lower than the national average.    But that isn't true, in fact quite the opposite. 

So far, at least, it looks as though abstinence education hasn't kept Texas teenagers from doing what comes naturally stupidly. On the contrary, Texas has the fourth highest AIDS rates and ranks second, behind Mississippi, in births among teens ages 15 to 17, according to a new study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation that draws on federal statistics. Chlamydia and gonorrhea rates are among the highest in the nation, according to Texas Department of Health statistics, and have increased since Bush became governor in 1995. 

In fact, says Peggy Romberg, director of the Texas Family Planning Association, "I don't think there's any data that shows the abstinence education programs are working at all. There are concerns that no one's evaluating them to see if they do work, which is the normal thing for any federal or state program."

Despite this, abstinence advocates are hoping to have a wider impact -- an impact that almost certainly would grow with Bush's election. 

Responding to the conservative critique of condoms, the NIH hosted a conference last month to examine scientific research on condom effectiveness, and it invited McIlhaney's institute to participate. While the findings haven't been released yet, several people who attended the meeting said the final report will conclude that condoms are very effective against AIDS, probably very effective against gonorrhea and chlamydia, and less protective against herpes and human papilloma virus. 

To most of the established scientists and doctors working on STDs who were at the meeting, the abstinence-only message has a latent potential for danger. 

"They have an uninformed position," says Dr. Robert D. Burk, a cervical cancer expert and professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College in New York. Burk says there is "unequivocal scientific evidence" that condoms reduce the risk of cervical cancer, in addition to their protection against other organisms.

"I think there are some major conceptual problems about what people use condoms for," he says. "Some use them for birth control, some to prevent STDs, some for both. People in long-term relationships think they are no longer at risk and stop using them, and that's probably when the majority of STDs are transmitted."

As for the conservatives' call for more condom research, Burk says it would be a waste of time and money. "It's a political agenda. They should be using those resources to develop vaccines or other preventive methods."

Macaluso, however, says that while public health officials should continue to stress condom use, "scientists have to face the fact that there is weaker evidence that condoms prevent the spread of things like chlamydia and gonorrhea." But he adds:   "The consensus of the meeting was that it's not evidence of a lack of efficacy -- it's just a lack of evidence."

But to Dr. Allan Brandt, a medical historian at Harvard Medical School who has written about the staggering rates of syphilis and gonorrhea that unprotected American soldiers got in France after World War I, there's something deeper to the condom discussion than questions of scientific evidence.

"The debate you're watching now is deeply historical," says Brandt. "There's always been this anxiety that if you put technology into the hands of people to promote sexual health you will also encourage what's perceived to be illicit sexuality. There's always been a perceived tradeoff between public health goals and the deep anxiety about sex in American culture. It comes out especially strong during times of war or epidemics."

To summarize, it looks like an abstinance only policy could get our children killed or at least diseased for life.  This is the price we will pay if we listen to the Right Wing Christian extremists with their head in the sand attitude.

NEXT SEE BUSH'S ETHICAL LAPSES

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