The Condom Conspiracy
          AIDS, Coming To A Person Near You

New guidelines are sure to increase risks of HIV infection as new regulations from President Bush’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, quietly issued dangerous programs that denounce condom use, while teaching abstinence as the only way to prevent the spread of AIDS.

The CDC is dismissing effective, disease-preventing safe-sex education that has long been used for HIV-prevention education in the United States. The abstinence-only programs, researchers say, actually increase the risk of contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

The new CDC guidelines will be mandatory for any organization that does HIV-prevention work and also receives federal funds. The CDC is the principal federal funder of prevention education about HIV and AIDS, and its head a Bush appointee.

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 a cucumber.

They also are demanding that all materials include information on the “lack of effectiveness of condom use” in preventing the spread of HIV and other STDs. Bottom line is that the Bush administration wants AIDS fighters to tell people: Condoms don’t work despite the fact that they do.

What is worse is that the CDC will now take the decisions on which AIDS-fighting educational materials actually work away from those on the frontlines of the combat against the epidemic, and hand them over to political appointees. This is done by requiring that Policy Review Panels, which each group engaged in HIV prevention must have, can no longer be appointed by that group but must instead be named by state and local health departments.

Those panels must then take a vote on all content before it is issued. This means that, under the new regs, political appointees will have a veto and be able to ban anything in those educational materials they deem “obscene” or lacking in anti-condom propaganda.

How They Plan On Further Hiding The Truth With Junk Science

The CDC’s politically inspired censorship includes “questionnaires and survey materials” and thus would forbid asking people if they engage in specific sexual acts without protection against HIV. Apparently asking that would be “obscene.” Questions about gay kids have already disappeared from the CDC’s national Youth Risk Survey after Christian-right pressure. What's next?

A third of all federal HIV-education money of about $270 million in Bush’s latest budget now goes to abstinence-only programs, almost universally to Christian groups as part of Bush’s “faith-based initiatives” (no Jewish or Muslim groups receive any funds). Much of this money goes to anti-abortion groups masquerading as “women’s health” or “crisis-pregnancy” centers.

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