Playing Politics with Sexual Health?, Part I - LONG

[Elspode]

You decide...from Salon.com .

No sex, please -- or we'll audit you

Why are some nonprofit organizations that don't agree with the Bush
administration's "abstinence only" philosophy repeatedly investigated by the
government, while faith-based groups get a free pass?

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By Christopher Healy

Oct. 28, 2003 | Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, condoms: George W. Bush
has a lot of enemies. And the question is finally starting to be asked, just
what steps is his administration willing to take in order to silence them?
Network anchormen and coffee-break pundits alike were abuzz over the
did-they-or-didn't-they CIA leak scandal. But the outing of Valerie Plame
isn't the only instance where the federal government has been suspected of
using its resources in direct, if somewhat sneaky, retaliation against its
political opponents. Ruining the lives of CIA agents may make for dynamic
headlines, but recent evidence shows that the Bush administration also has
much smaller fish to fry.

Take Advocates for Youth, a national nonprofit organization that provides
teens with accurate and informative sex education. In 18 years as a federal
grantee, it has never been subjected to a government financial audit. That
is, until it was suddenly hit with three in less than a year (one by the
Centers for Disease Control back in October 2002, a second by the General
Accounting Office in early 2003, and the third just two months ago, by a
different arm of the CDC). The organization is crying conspiracy -- saying
that it's being unfairly targeted because of its negative views toward the
administration's abstinence-only education policies -- and the claims appear
to be more than just paranoia.

In July 2001 the Washington Post published a leaked memo from the Department
of Health and Human Services in which Advocates for Youth was described as
"ardent critics of the Bush administration." This charge apparently came as
the result of several Advocates for Youth press releases that railed against
the president's backing of the "global gag rule" that prohibited any funding
to foreign agencies that performed or facilitated abortions. In the leaked
memo, it was also suggested that the Advocates for Youth programs did not go
over well with the HHS because "the secretary [Tommy Thompson] is a devout
Roman Catholic."

While Advocates for Youth may be near the top of Tommy Thompson's Most
Wanted list, it is certainly not alone. After a group of activists booed
Thompson at an international AIDS conference in Barcelona last year, a cadre
of congressional Republicans called for investigations of the hecklers'
various organizations. The CDC has conducted three reviews in the past 10
months of San Francisco's STOP AIDS program in an effort to make sure that
none of its federal grant dollars have gone toward funding workshops that
may promote sexual activity. And the New York-based Sexuality Information
and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) has been audited twice
this year (its first audits ever, despite a decade of receiving federal
grants), evidently because it created No New Money for
Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs, a Web site designed to educate the
public about the possible dangers of abstinence-only education and to call
for grassroots campaigns against the continued funding of these programs.

So far, Advocates for Youth, STOP AIDS and SIECUS have come through all of
their audits with flying colors. But last year, as it turns out, a number of
federal grantees were found guilty of misusing their government money. They
were faith-based organizations.

In Louisiana, a number of sex-education programs funded by Gov. Mike
Foster's Program on Abstinence were found guilty in a federal court of
openly violating the constitutional tenet of separation of church and state.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued the governor's program after
discovering numerous violations, including the use of grant money to teach
abstinence through scripture, to perform skits with Christ as a character,
to purchase Bibles, and to fund prayer vigils at abortion clinics. Though
those Louisiana nonprofits are now required to turn in regular reports to
the governor about their activities, none, to date, have been put before an
HHS audit.

"Our complaint is not with getting audited," says Advocates' president James
Wagoner. "Our complaint is with the selective and political nature of these
audits. Ideology is invading -- if not subverting -- science within the
Department of Health and Human Services [which houses the CDC], and we ended
up on the audit table because we are one of the organizations pointing that
out."

Advocates for Youth has continually stood behind its time-tested,
research-backed policy of comprehensive sex education and HIV prevention, as
opposed to adopting the Bush-backed method of abstinence-only education.
Through its varied and numerous programs -- ranging from peer counseling and
educator training to the creation of lesson plans and instructional
videos -- Advocates for Youth has worked nationally and internationally to,
as their mission statement reads, "help young people make informed and
responsible decisions about their sexual and reproductive health." This
includes providing them with information about contraceptives as well as
abstinence and brings with it a sensitivity toward all forms of sexuality.

Comprehensive sex education has, for years, had the backing of the
scientific community as an excellent preventive measure against teen
pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Its proponents -- the American
Medical Association, the National Institutes of Health, and the American
Academy of Pediatrics among them -- will point to studies in publications
such as the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Adolescent
Health and the Journal of School Health, to back up their claims.

Support for the other side comes mostly from non-science sources, like
Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation. In a much quoted
April 2002 diatribe against comprehensive sex education, Rector cited a
study from the Journal of the American Medical Association to back up his
claims that abstinence-only programs work. He pointed out that the results
of this study showed that teens who take "virginity pledges" exhibited a
delay in their initiation of sexual activity. He failed to include, however,
information from that same study that also reported that virginity pledges
did not work for children under 14 or over 17; that they didn't work in
communities where more than 30 percent of the teens took the pledge; and
that teens who broke their pledges were far less likely to use
contraception.

There is a clear lack of scientific data to back up the efficacy of
abstinence-only programs, yet they have the full and complete support of the
federal government. Hence James Wagoner's fears about ideology interfering
with public health.

Wagoner is not the first one to charge the CDC with manipulating science for
ideological purposes. In 1999, the CDC posted a page on its Web site listing
sex-education "Programs That Work" from around the country that had
curricula proven to be effective. All of the cited programs were
comprehensive and included information about both abstinence and
contraception; none were abstinence-only programs. Despite repeated outcries
from proponents of abstinence-only, the list remained intact. That is, until
George W. Bush came into office.

That Web page has vanished from the CDC's site, as have positive statements
about condom use. Research results showing that abortions have no definitive
link to breast cancer were taken off the National Cancer Institute's Web
site, which is part of HHS. And now with these suspiciously motivated
audits, it appears that HHS has graduated from simply hiding scientific
information that offends the religious right, to retaliating against groups
that disseminate that information.

There are three streams of revenue from which the federal government has
chosen to award grant money to abstinence-only education programs: the
Adolescent Family Life Act, started by President Reagan in 1981; the Welfare
Reform Act of 1996; and the newly developed Special Programs of Regional and
National Significance, which puts federal money directly into the hands of
community-based organizations. All of these initiatives share a strictly
delineated eight-point definition of "abstinence-only" that any program must
meet to receive funding. Basically, this amounts to teens being taught that
the only way to avoid pregnancy or STDs is to abstain from any and all
sexual activity until marriage. For a program to comply with the eight-point
definition, it must teach students that "a mutually faithful monogamous
relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual
activity." Teachers in these programs are not allowed to endorse the use of
condoms or other forms of contraception. However, they are apparently
allowed to use instructional texts containing lines such as, "Is it fair to
make a baby die because of a bad decision his or her parents made?" and
"What if a girl came to school in a crop top, just barely covering her bra,
and shorts starting three inches below her navel? What 'game' would she be
playing?"