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Government to blame for 'safe sex' lie For years, in a deep bow to the post-1960s libertine culture, federal health agencies assiduously have promoted the idea of "safe sex" out of wedlock. AIDS, an entirely preventable disease, has been the crutch upon which "safe sex" education stands. But a new National Institutes of Health report conclusively shows that the campaign for "safe sex" has been at best misleading and at worst hazardous to randy Americans' health. While the report notes that condoms indeed are effective at preventing pregnancy and AIDS, as well as gonorrhea among men, the report also says evidence is lacking concerning the prevention of other sexually transmitted diseases and that more research should be done on "behavioral interventions" -- i.e., abstinence. Former Oklahoma Rep. Tom Coburn, a physician whose formal request as a member of Congress prompted the study, succinctly summarized the study's implication: "For decade, the federal government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to promote an unsubstantiated claim that promiscuity can be safe. We all now know for a fact that that is a lie. Coburn also is author of a law requiring federal agencies to use "medically accurate information regarding the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of condoms." He has now written a letter to Health and Human Service Secretary Tommy Thompson requesting, based on the NIH study's results, that the department no longer "refer to sex as 'safe' or 'protected'" because neither term is medically accurate. Both libertines and those who shrug, "They'll do it anyway," no doubt vigorously will disagree with the NIH study's conclusions, as well as the implications in law highlighted by Coburn. Yet the government's well-funded public relations campaign for "safe sex" surely has served to feed the misguided notion that out-of-wedlock sexual relations are relatively harmless, if only conducted "properly." The government bears considerable responsibility for the shattering of what was once the national moral consensus against promiscuity. That consensus will not easily be rebuilt, if it ever can be rebuilt, but at minimum the government should, in light of the medical evidence, back away from its dangerous "safe sex" campaign and instead promote the subtler, more complicated truth. |
