Sunday, July 04, 2004 PORN PORN OBSCENE PORN
My friend K. was homeschooled until junior high, just like me, and like me, she was media-deprived as a kid. Like me, she had access to her local newspaper and the Readers Digest. This may explain why each of us (neither of us knowing the other) started hanging around churches in high school--to meet boys. The one she hung around involved some sort of calvinist theology. Mine was a coffee and macrame church that didn't enforce any God stuff, and while I got bored and drifted away once I realized that Ann Landers and the compilers of Life in These United States had been steering me wrong when they told me to meet potential mates through church groups, I really approve of one thing about the Unitarians.
Those guys will teach any old body about safe sex! It seemed like every week, we were putting a condom on some kind of suggestive vegtable. It was a good youth group.
But really, that route is not for everyone. The fashion alone keeps all manner of right-thinking teens away.
I write today because it is in your power to allow children to bypass the difficult decision between Unitarian Universalism* and risking death and suffering.
This article describes how those fraternity pranksters in the Bush administration's Center for Disease Control are getting AIDS educators to stop drawing dirty pictures.
The CDC unveiled some new regulations a few weeks ago to shore up the "abstinence only" agenda that right-wing wack-a-doos have been all into for a while.
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 on a dildo, or even a cucumber. And they demand that all such materials include information on the “lack of effectiveness of condom use” in preventing the spread of HIV and other STDs -- in other words, the Bush administration wants AIDS fighters to tell people: Condoms don’t work. This demented exigency flies in the face of every competent medical body’s judgment that, in the absence of an HIV-preventing vaccine, the condom is the single most effective tool available to protect someone from getting or spreading the AIDS virus.
Seriously, click the article.
There's a lot more, and it'll make you want to go and hide under the bed. Before you pull the blanket down to camouflague your presence, though, be sure to send an indignant e-mail to HIVComments@cdc.gov. They're accepting public comments until August 16.
*I guess they could go to some other private organization, but I don't know of anybody who's as prophylactic-happy as those Unitarians.
posted by Frenz | 7/04/2004 01:48:00 AM
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