We Don't Say Naughty Words

The AIDS epidemic is raging, maybe even out of control. Some of the finest medical researchers in the nation are deeply immersed in the problem, and thoughtful, responsible health officials throughout the nation are issuing grave warnings about the possibility of infection with HIV.

When the AIDS business first showed up it was thought to be a disease occurring almost completely among homosexuals. The religious right, having no sympathy with what they considered Godless homosexuals, praised the Lord that a scourge had come to wipe them out. Now that AIDS has moved into the heterosexual community and is spread by bi-sexual and heterosexual intercourse, the understood need is to get out the word to the ordinary every day public. The first warnings went out to drug users and homosexuals. To the first group the message was, "Use clean needles." To the second it was, "Use condoms." Many local public health facilities provided clean needles.

As part of its election strategy, however, the Republican National Committee took up the agenda of the religious right, which takes up its agenda passionately and divisively, having no tolerance or compassion with those who disagree with it. (We are witnessing the grievous mischief of the positions of their precedents in the way the abortion issue is being mishandled.)

It took almost twenty years, starting with Nixon, but by persisting, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush have appointed a majority of justices to the Supreme Court. The Court is now constituted to counter the wave of majority thought and substitute the narrow religious literalness of the minority. The Nixon, Reagan, Bush Court has abandoned any pretext of the Supreme Court protecting the rights of the citizens-sovereign.

When the nation was founded a phrase arose concerning a potential abuse of power in the nation. This was "the tyranny of the majority." To the consternation of our citizens-sovereign, we now have a new phrase because such a phrase is needed to cover a fact in today's national life: "The tyranny of the minority."

Minority presidents appoint minority-position justices, judges, and minority advocating bureaucrats, resulting in the nation now having a full fledged tyranny of the minority.

What this minority group is pushing is a religious agenda in a nation that has the separation of church and state as a prime directive—a religious agenda, I might add, that is at odds with and inimical to democratic or republican thought, and which is more related to the authoritarian systems of government that our American democracy was founded to escape. In short, the religious right would like to take us back to those delightful days of yore when the Inquisition was in full force and where a person considered a witch or warlock could be cleansed of her or his heretical thought by being burned at the stake; to a time reminiscent of communist Russia (Karl Marx is the modern successor of Martin Luther, according to Reaching for Heaven on Earth, Robert H. Nelson 1991), where thought control was an essen(tial) sought to impose its dicta and creed with the power and authority of the State. It's sinful, it's immoral and unethical, it's antidemocratic, antirepublican, and it prostitutes government to serve the immoral agenda of an authoritarian religious minority. It's also bad religion. It's a perfect demonstration of why, in a free society, separation of church and state is absolutely essential for freedom and liberty.

The religious right has had a great deal of trouble, traditionally, with sexuality. God is asexual. The fall of Adam and Eve is perceived by many as being the result of acquiring (and using) the knowledge of sex. This has been perceived as a major sin, and has led to many a hang up. Never mind that it is part of our biological heritage and a necessity for procreation.

AIDS is a mean, vicious killer. It kills people in a protracted, degenerative, nasty way, letting its victims waste away before killing them. There is no cure yet. But there will be one. It simply takes understanding of the genetics and biochemistry of the virus(es) causing the disease, to devise the appropriate treatment. Meanwhile, the disease spreads. The epidemic has raged at various places on the globe unchecked for ten years. A great portion of the population of Africa is involved and even may be wiped out. Numbers moving into the millions are afflicted in the United States—some without their knowledge. The fact that a religious viewpoint is being propagated at the highest levels of the government's health care system, especially at the very time that the nation is experiencing one of the all-time most insidious health threats of history, shrieks to the immorality of co-mingling religious doctrine with the operation of the State.

Surreptitiously, we have a State religion promulgated by Republican administrations through the actions of their extreme right, religious, political appointees. In reality, our recent national presidents and their right wing, religious co-workers are all in violation of their oaths of office. They are not faithfully defending the Constitution against its enemies, foreign and domestic, especially domestic, as they are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. They are depriving millions of people, who constitute the majority of our population, their proper role in a nonreligious, republican State. They are depriving citizens-sovereign of their unalienable rights.

By now everyone must know about HHS Secretary Louis Sullivan's gag order forbidding Federally funded medical clinics to mention a word about abortion. This is immoral and unethical behavior in a free society, especially since the rule was not promulgated in repose to legislation but was put forth as a ukase. If a religious group wants to keep its adherents ignorant, that is its private matter. To insist on such censorship of information as a regular part of doing government business is nonfeasance and malfeaseance.

To think that the government of the United States would have as an official policy, advocated not only by the faceless political appointees but also by the President of the United States; one of ignorance!—ignorance! The willful withholding of life-and-death information from citizens is immoral and unethical. To hold, as the Supreme Court did, that Secretary Sullivan's order was valid, is prostitution of our democratic system for sectarian religious purposes. It is the act of immoral and unethical people. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the top lab for the study of communicable diseases in the United States, operated by the U.S. Public Health Service, put together some TV materials to call attention to the severe risk AIDS poses to the general public. The ads were to the point—blunt, simple, and clear speak on this vital issue. The thrust of the ads' message was, "Use condoms." The creators of the ads produced them for a sexually active public, including teenagers—a group known to be active sexually and, therefore, at risk for lethal AIDS as much as adults.

Enters William Roper, Director of CDC, on the scene, playing the role of God. He cancels all ads in the program "America Responds to AIDS" that used the words "condom" or "sex." (The Washington Post, April 9, 1992). With his decision probably more Americans will die because they did not receive adequate information with which to protect themselves at an earlier time. Instead of providing this information in early 1992, Director Roper decided to limit the government's role to general messages that do not mention sex or condoms. Director Roper's behavior is frustrating—even maddening. It's not his government. It's not his CDC. Director Roper is violating all the principles our Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution held dear when they fashioned our government. His action blasphemes all the lives that were spent to obtain our freedoms and liberties. He needlessly put additional innocent lives at risk.

The U.S. Public Health Service has been charged with providing the United States a prevention, response to the threat of AIDS. The CDC should be the prime tool for the fight against AIDS. With Director Roper at the helm it is not.

Associate Director Curt Smith of the Federal Office of Personnel Management, the political agency that replaced the independent Civil Service Commission thought that a discussion of birth control would be offensive to Federal employees, so he had the Blue Cross/Blue Shield health insurance program remove the chapter on birth control from the book they were about to send to their enrollees. The chapter was intended to help the enrollees make the best use possible of their health care. "Silence," Smith said, "was better than being offensive." Associate Director Smith interposed himself between the clients of a medical plan and the medical experts of that plan to have your government keep you and/or your children from knowing about birth control. The government thinks that certain potentially life-saving information can be offensive, preferring that you be ignorant. Not to worry that your children's lives may be at risk. Constitutional guarantees dictate that information flow freely in a free society. The only exception is classified information necessary to the physical defense of the nation. Education is an unalienable right as is the right to health, yet some so-called religiously minded political appointees, setting their own moral standards, deny vital health information to their employees.

If our government health care leaders and political appointees can not face the issue of sexuality and disease, and if they can not face the issue of sexuality among teenagers, they should seek other less stressing means of employment preferably out of government. Education is an unalienable right. Withholding information violates that right. Health is also an unalienable right, and to jeopardize it violates the right. To violate the unalienable rights of the citizens-sovereign is to commit lese majesté, i.e, it is a crime against the sovereign, We the People. To commit lese majesté in the name of religion desecrates the concepts of democracy and freedom, makes a mockery of liberty, and profanes the republic.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1992
Institute for domestic Tranquility