Archive for the ‘Sex, Science and Government’ Category

There is a war against sexual science in this country. Its not really new. Christianity has been waging a war for a long time against sexuality and anything, including science, that helps us better understand it.. In some of my old books on sexuality from around the turn of the last century, the authors even admit that if they actually told the truth of what they knew about sexuality, the book could never be published because it would offend the religious.

For a long time, America was rather backward scientifically. Sputnik changed things. Suddenly, America realized that science was important. If we were going to compete globally, we needed to educate our children in the sciences. This led directly to America’s lead in science and technology

Of course, things are different now. America is losing its edge in technology. Science is getting short shrift in schools once again, and many topics are simply ignored. They don’t want to offend fundamentalist Christians, who object to many aspects of geology, biology, physics, and other sciences they see as contradicting their literal interpretation of the Bible. There is an overall war against science in this country, fueled not just by fundamentalists, but also by corporations that do not want limits on their activities that might be damaging the environment, endangering health, or causing global warming. Sceince has been deemphasized in the classroom and in congress. How and why this is happening is well documented in Chris Mooney’s excellent book, the Republican War on Science.

In no other area have they seen more success than in their war on sexual science. Under the second Bush administration it was the official policy of our current government. There are many ecellent examples in Marty Klein’s book, The War on Sex. I believe any of the Republican candidates for president would once again make anti-sex pseudoscience official U.S. policy.

The Obama administration backed off on the war against sex, but a look at what occurred during the Bush administration is a good reminder of what we may have to look forward to under a Republican presidency. Under Bush, throughout our government, the power of various agencies was  redirected into the hands of those with a political agenda and little respect for science. Many of them were classical scientific cranks, pseudoscientists with as much credibility as a young earth creationist.

The FDA was scientifically compromised. Over the counter emergency birth control was delayed for years, due in part to recommendations completely ignoring science by crackpot Dr David Hager. Hager opposes birth control for unmarried women, and clings to the scientifically false notion that emergency contraception causes abortions. Bush named appointees to the FDA advisory committee on reproductive health who opposed not only abortion, but contraception as well.

The surgeon general, Richard Camera, was muzzled on sexual topics, including the failure of abstinence education and Plan B.

The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control websites were told to remove information about the effectiveness of condoms from their websites, replacing it with pro-abstinence propaganda. A separate CDC listing of sex-education “Programs that Work,” meant to give local officials information on scientifically proven methods of reducing risky teen sexual behavior was also removed.

Senator Tom Coburn, known for his extremist anti-condom views and attempts to have condoms relabeled as being ineffective, before being elected was made co-chair the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.

Bush Appointed Ellen Sauerbrey to be the Representative to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. She has said that sex education is unhealthy to the family, and is strongly opposed to abortion and birth control.

The Department of Health and Human Services were compromised. Bush appointed Eric Keroack as assistant secretary of population affairs, in charge of DHHS family planning programs. He has said that birth control is demeaning to women. He is also a proponent of the pseudoscientific belief that premarital sex suppresses the production of oxycontin, thus making it impossible to have a successful long term marriage. They also launched a web site called 4parents with advice for parents on how to keep their kids from having unwanted pregnancies or becoming sexually active. A review by four health experts found the site riddled with factual errors, including calling condoms only moderately effective and providing misinformation about STDs. The site was corrected for awhile after a storm of complaints, but hass been recently updated with new misinformation. While claiming that the site was created by government scientists, it was in fact created by an anti-choice anti-gay right wing advocacy group.

International AIDS programs were forbidden to talk about condoms or distribute condoms, even though rape and the spread of HIV is on the rise in many countries. International family planning programs were forbidden to even mention the subject of abortion, even when the woman’s life is at risk.

A delegation to the U.N’s Special Session on Children led by presidential candidate Tommy Thompson joined with Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Iraq and the Vatican to eliminate comprehensive sex education for adolescents, restrict STD-prevention and contraceptive information to heterosexual married couples, and redefine “reproductive health services” to exclude legal abortion.

Unbelievably, a US delegation to the World Summit on Sustainable development joined again with the Vatican and Islamic countries to oppose including language that would characterize female genital mutilation, forced child marriage and honor killings as human rights violations.

In an attempt to alter language in the earlier landmark agreement of 179 countries in 1994 at the International Conference on Population and Development, State Department representative Elaine Jones expressed the official U.S. position that natural family-planning methods be emphasized in the updated conference document, offering her own experience with the Billings method of birth control. An Iranian delegate, who was also an ob-gyn, pointed out that these methods have a very high failure rate, and that it says so in all the U.S. textbooks.

Congress has had Judith Reisman appear as an expert witness on pornography and other issues. Her life’s work has primarily been devoted to trying to destroy the credibility and research of Alfred Kinsey, an agenda for which no lie is too outrageous. She also supports many pseudoscientific sex theories.

Sex education in our schools was all but dismantled, replaced by federally funded abstinence education that, when it rarely deals with anything scientific, typically gets the facts wrong. This has been well-documented by Henry Waxman’s congressional investigation and many studies.

The ban against federally funded stem cell research was based on a complete misunderstanding of the basic science. People’s lives were sacrificed who might have been saved by the research, to save embryos that would be discarded anyway.

Republicans and a some Democrats continue to wage a war against sex and sex science. All they need is access to the presidency to make their dreams of sexual repression and scientific misinformation come true.