“Critics Say Government Deleted Web Site Material to Push
Abstinence,” reads the New York Times headline. Would one
of those critics be the New York Times? No, it is just
neutrally relaying Henry Waxman’s concerns. The dispassionate
reporter assigned to the story was Teddy Kennedy biographer Adam
Clymer.
Close observers of President Bush will recall that he once
called Clymer a “major-league asshole.” Clymer has repaid the
compliment by serving as a bullhorn for Bush’s critics. Tuesday’s
shocking story on the Bush administration’s attempt “to push
abstinence” reads like a press release from one of the Democrats’
socially liberal caucuses.
That the Bush administration has removed, among other things,
“information on condom use” from a government website smacks of
chilling censorship, implies Clymer. Clymer says that “critics” —
in other words, he and his friends — are accusing the “Department
of Health and Human Services of censoring medical information in
order to promote a philosophy of sexual abstinence.”
The department has “quietly expunged information on how using
condoms protects against AIDS, how abortion does not increase the
risk of breast cancer and how to run programs proven to reduce
teenage sexual activity,” writes Clymer. The piece is peppered with
comically tendentious phrases like “quietly expunged.” Clymer,
hiding behind “protests” from members of Congress and socially
liberal advocacy groups, wonders if the department is “bowing to
pressure from social conservatives.” Following reasonable orders
becomes “bowing to pressure” if those orders don’t hew to Clymer’s
liberalism. Also, notice the continuing fiction, which the
Times clings to ferociously, that the Bush administration
is a captive of social conservatives.
Clymer reminds readers that the “department has previously been
accused of subverting science to politics,” though presumably he is
not referencing the Clinton years. One might say that withholding
information from teens about the failure rate of condoms represents
politics over science, or that not closing down homosexual
bathhouses and other such petri dishes for disease represents
politics over science. But that’s not what Clymer has in mind.
He gives Henry Waxman an unchallenged shot at the Bush
administration: “We’re concerned that their decisions are being
driven by ideology and not science, particularly those who want to
stop sex education.”
Are Waxman’s decisions driven by ideology? No, apparently it is
pure science that leads him to approve of teen condom use. This
great scourge of the tobacco companies sees great risks in giving
teens cigarettes but no risks in giving them condoms — a
conclusion reached no doubt through long hours in the lab.
What Clymer considers bad news, most Americans probably consider
good news. After the Clinton years, an administration which
“promotes a philosophy of sexual abstinence” should not strike too
much fear in them.
The outrage is not that condom information has disappeared from
a taxpayer-financed website, but that it appeared in the first
place. Why should the American taxpayer have to finance the sexual
ethos of MTV?
In California, taxpayers pay for a health department website
that helps teens and other Californians decide “which birth control
method is right for you.” It directs them to taxpayer-subsidized
“reproductive health” services — the state euphemism for abortion
and free contraceptives — so that they can have a “healthy sex
life” and recourse to “confidential family planning.” A state
government which obsessively tells teens to abstain from cigarettes
can’t bring itself to tell them to abstain from pre-marital sex —
and will even help arrange it behind their parents’ backs.
Now state officials are boasting about the dropping teen birth
rate, which for the first time in over twenty years has fallen
below the national average. This is “great news,” according to
state health officials. Teens are behaving more “responsibly,” they
say. What they conveniently don’t report is the number of teen
pregnancies, a far more revealing number, or the rate of teen STDs
and teen promiscuity. The state government’s “great news” amounts
to teens learning how to abort and contracept with more ruthless
efficiency on the taxpayer’s dime.
It is the sort of success story that Adam Clymer may soon
report.
