USATODAY.com - Top Democrats say Bush policy will weaken HIV prevention programs: A new Bush administration policy that imposes a new layer of state or local review on federally funded HIV prevention programs has drawn a stern rebuke from top congressional Democrats. Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., Nanci Pelosi, D-Calif., and Steny Hoyer, D-Md., objected to the policy in a Sept. 11 letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson. [...] "The process that's now in place has worked well for over a decade," Waxman said. "My fear is that the new requirement would politicize prevention, so that conservatives who are offended by new HIV prevention messages could ignore the urgency of the message and turn it into something bland and ineffective."
Mr Waxman, sir? I'm pretty sure that's kind of the freakin' POINT of the revision. And it's sophistry to the extreme not to recognize that HIV prevention programs have and always will be politicized. Anything to do with sex and sexuality in this country will be politicized, because that's just the way we do things. Education and disease prevention are, and will probably always be, secondary to the politics of the issue at hand. As it stands, the administration has subjected long-established and proven programs to ceaseless audits, determined to drive the programs out of business. (Well, they can't be in the least concerned about the ides that a program is violating content guidelines when the subject it to back to back audits; when would a program have had time to violate content guidelines between audits?) This administration truly does not care in the slightest about effective AIDS/HIV prevention, just as it cares not at all about effective sex education -- and not a lot about effective education, period.
Posted by iain at September 15, 2003 12:34 PMComments
