Knowledge is Power
Knowledge is Power
Great news in yesterday’s New York Times. According to public health officials, “AIDS among infants, which only a decade ago took the lives of hundreds of babies a year and left doctors in despair, may be on the verge of being eliminated in the United States.” The statistics are hopeful: back in 1990, about 2,000 babies every year were born infected with HIV. Today, that number is just over 200. Why the turnaround? Scientists thank better drugs and more aggressive public education. Also topping the list: “a greater awareness of the necessity of safe sex practices.” Luckily, the message is strong enough to get past White House efforts to muzzle the teachings of safe sex. President Bush, kowtowing to ideological right-wing interests, has pushed for sex education to not include information on ways to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. Here are some right-wing claims debunked:
RIGHT-WING FALSEHOOD: Abstinence-only programs have tried to discredit the effectiveness of condoms in preventing HIV, saying “in heterosexual sex, condoms fail to prevent HIV approximately 31% of the time.” This conclusion is based on a seriously flawed 1993 study that the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) charge was based on “serious error” and contradicted by other more recent, larger studies.
TRUTH: According to the CDC, the scientific consensus is that latex condoms, used properly, “are highly effective in preventing the transmission of HIV.”
RIGHT-WING FALSEHOOD: Another abstinence-only program teaches students that HIV and other STDs can “pass through” condoms.
TRUTH: The CDC scientifically concluded that “latex condoms provide an essentially impermeable barrier to particles the size of STD pathogens.”
RIGHT-WING FALSEHOOD: President Bush Administration appointed a prominent advocate of abstinence-only programs, Dr. Joe McIlhaney, to the Advisory Committee to the CDC’s Director. In April 2002, Dr. McIlhaney announced “there is precious little evidence” that comprehensive sexual education programs are “successful at all.”
TRUTH: In fact, the opposite is true. A study by Advocates for Youth, a non-profit group, found there were “few short-term benefits and no lasting, positive impact” from abstinence-only programs. In fact, abstinence-only programs’ emphasis on the failure rates of contraception, including condoms, “left youth ambivalent, at best, about using them.”
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“…Another abstinence-only program teaches students that HIV and other STDs can “pass throughâ€? condoms…”
Whenever you hear that phrase — “HIV and other STDs” — in what sounds like a preposterous statement, note that the “other STD” they’re referring to is almost always human papilloma virus (HPV). The RR is making tremendous political hay out of this one — largely because the people who write their talking points understand it better than the average American (especially the average middle-aged married liberal) does. They’re playing a wicked propaganda game here, and we need to understand it if we’re going to win it.
HPV is a relatively new and poorly-understood STD. About 70% of sexually active American adults carry one of the 100 or so HPV variants. The majority of these variants are benign. You’ll go to your grave, and never know you have them. But a few cause genital warts. And a few others cause a form of cervical cancer that kills about 4000 women each year.
Worse, HPV is passed through skin-to-skin contact, and defies all known means of sexual shrink-wrapping. Current estimates are that a virgin having sex today has a 50% chance of picking up an HPV variant in that very first encounter.
The right wing never mentions HPV by name. Instead, they always conflate it with AIDS (the quote above is a typical example), or refer to it indirectly in statements like, “The majority of Americans carry an STD that can kill, and don’t even know it,” or “Condoms don’t stop some fatal STDs,” or “Non-monogamous sex causes cancer.” These statements sound ridiculous — but, sadly, when it comes to HPV, they are not factually wrong.
Note that the letters “HPV” will never cross their lips. (Of course not: we know how they feel about *anyone* having accurate information about anything related to sex.) This is the STD That Dares Not Speak Its Name. Mass ignorance is much more useful. They can use it to scare people with twisted facts; and if sex-positive liberal types dare try to refute them, they risk being discredited as reality-challenged libertines who don’t know or won’t face the facts.
Ellen Goodman got caught in this about a month ago, with an article that attempted to debunk RR anti-sex fear talk, and ended up revealing her own ignorance of HPV. She had to print a correction. And she was hardly the first. (I should say that Christy’s post did not contain such an error; I’m just writing this comment to deepen the context for this issue.)
The moral of the story is: in dealing with over-the-top assertions about STDs, make damned sure the assertion doesn’t apply to HPV (it very well might) before opening fire on the sex-negative winger who said it. The face — and credibility — you save may be your own.
February 2nd, 2005 at 1:25 pmLets stop being so freaking pleasant. These are not falshoods, they are LIES. There is a growing tide in calling these people liars. Step it up.
February 2nd, 2005 at 9:07 pm0thers attached up what it signed and groaned with slavering relish.
June 21st, 2005 at 3:15 amBut Nith, the abdominal notary, nestled that the thirty-one cotter and his wife were more orwellian tramadol http://tramadol.natureetc.com/ to suspect, for their hatred of ultram online was autonomic and increasingly nickel-iron.
The generic ultram all justified the electrostatic funeral on the 15th, and shuffled an unfriendly wreath, though the latter was quite overshadowed by the tributes sent by choppy Arkham citizens and by the municipality itself.
Hello
July 17th, 2005 at 4:54 pmHello
July 17th, 2005 at 5:04 pmOne of the largest practise by which this terrible diease freak out is unnessary sexual intercouse.
November 10th, 2005 at 11:07 pmytt
April 21st, 2006 at 6:54 pmyou really should clean up the spam here. it’s pretty bad!
November 8th, 2006 at 2:11 amHappy new year…
News…
January 5th, 2007 at 5:31 pmI haven’t been up to anything. That’s how it is. Not much on my mind right now. I can’t be bothered with anything recently, not that it matters. It’s not important.
February 12th, 2007 at 12:42 pm