I'm about ready to change my mind in the Taxation thread because of this. The use of taxes or federal funding to encourage (read: force) certain behaviors needs some serious safeguards to prevent this sort of abuse.
Further, they're removing anyone who speaks against it and replacing them with yes men. Hell with a potential Theocracy in Iraq, we may be faced with one in the U.S. shortly, if not already here.
Caveats: This article is, quite obviously, heavily biased. I'd love to see more objective information on the changes that have happened. I'll reserve final judgement until I can find some (or someone else finds it for me), but this seems to be some rather important shit going down, and I suspect many people here might be interested in it.
Selected Quotes:
Meanwhile, across the pond, the US government's strategy for disease prevention was hardly in tune with the philosophy that has taken root around the world – and so masterfully expressed by the Brits: Give people accurate, comprehensive information and services, and they are more likely to stay healthy. Instead of finding similarly clever ways to disseminate such information to the American public, the Bush administration was actively trying to censor it.
The most blatant attack was the severe gutting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) fact sheet on condoms, which had been disappeared from the website in July 2001 and replaced, with significant battle scars, in December 2002. Pre-Bush, the fact sheet had encouraged consistent condom use, advice supported by vast bodies of scientific research that show condoms to be 98-100 percent effective in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. "The primary reason that condoms sometimes fail," read the original fact sheet, "is incorrect or inconsistent use, not failure of the condoms itself." Following that statement was user-friendly guidance on proper use.
Now, according to the once nonpartisan CDC, abstinence is the "surest way to avoid transmission of sexually transmitted diseases." Along with the condom "how to," the CDC removed the "Programs that Work" section, which summarized several large studies of teenagers that found no increase or hastening of sexual activity among those who were taught about condoms.
In middle and high schools across the country, teachers are being directed to adhere to the Federal Definition of Abstinence-Only Education, which requires that a program teach, among other things, that "a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity" and that any other sexual activity "is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects." By law, teachers cannot "promote or endorse" condoms or show adolescents how to use them, nor can they recognize any relationship outside of heterosexual marriage. Rebecca Schleifer, an HIV/AIDS researcher at Human Rights Watch, led a study of abstinence-only programs in Texas and calls them nothing less than "censorship."
...
Another facet of the McLennan program is television commercials. One shows a dad telling his son to use condoms followed by a voiceover warning, "Condoms will not protect people from many sexually transmitted diseases, and you could be spreading lies to your children." Schleifer spoke to counselors and teachers who heard from teens, including one who was an active intravenous drug user, who said they no longer bothered using condoms because they'd heard on TV they didn't work.
Even the scientific community – a group that usually hovers above the political fray – began shoring up its own defenses as it came to light last fall that the Department of Health and Human Services was purging scientific advisory committees of scientists whose research might undermine the Bush administration's political goals, and replacing them with thinly credentialed ideologues, who, for instance, agree with raising permissible levels of lead in drinking water and oppose workplace ergonomic standards.
The Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS is another major battleground. Its co-chair, Tom Coburn, has accused the director of the CDC of "lying" about condom safety and asked that he be fired. These actions prompted scathing editorials in prestigious journals and sharp statements from groups like the American Public Health Association. According to the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972, committees must be "fairly balanced" and "not inappropriately influenced by the appointing authority." Donald Kennedy, editor of Science, referenced this law in rebuking the administration: "It would be a good idea for HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson and the White House Personnel Office to read the law, and then follow it."
Bush's censorious activities seem to be gaining momentum, but the strategy was evident on his very first day in office, when he reinstated the "global gag rule" (or Mexico City Policy), which literally gags any foreign recipient of US family planning funds from so much as uttering the word "abortion," even where it is legal and even if they use their own funds to do so. The Center for Reproductive Rights (formerly the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy) is suing the Bush administration for violating the first amendment rights of its American attorneys working overseas and calls the policy "government sanctioned censorship – plain and simple."
... and some flipper baby sites I can't access cuz my server sucks.
