Like Colin Powell a few weeks before him, Health and Human Services chief Tommy Thompson resigned recently, his reputation having been shredded like rotten cabbage put through a Cuisinart. Thompson, as governor of Wisconsin, had won the respect of some AIDS activists in the state, particularly for his expansion of Medicaid coverage for people with HIV. He now leaves the Bush White House having overseen the most kooky, dangerous sex education the government has ever promoted—including telling teens that pregnancy can occur from heavy petting and that abortion leads to sterility and suicide.
Like Powell, who sold Bush's lies on WMDs, Thompson continued to back the madness, though we're now told he wanted to escape sooner. He waited until after the election, giving Bush some cover. As in the case of Powell, he'll likely be replaced with someone far more to the right and completely loyal to Bush.
One person mentioned as a possible replacement is Mark McClellan, former head of the FDA under Bush—the same FDA that has been in bed with drug companies keeping unsafe drugs on the market—who is now Medicare and Medicaid administrator for a White House that has stripped both programs. McClellan's father, Barr McClellan, is a Texas lawyer and a right-wing conspiracy theorist who published a book that claims President Kennedy was murdered under orders from Vice President Lyndon Johnson. ( His brother, Scott McClellan, is the White House spokesman. )
In a bizarre parting shot—an attempt, perhaps, to save whatever was left of his integrity—Thompson issued a dire warning to the public and to his replacement regarding the threat from a human flu pandemic, which he called a 'really huge bomb.' He then offered terrorists some ideas about how to attack us next time.
'For the life of me,' Thompson said, 'I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.'
It would have been nice if the HHS secretary had told us earlier how he has not been able to sleep 'every single night' because the food supply is not thoroughly inspected, like the 95 percent of containers entering U.S. ports that Bush refuses to put under scrutiny. If Thompson had a spine, he'd have stepped down before the election and announced his fears, putting the country and American lives ahead of his own and Bush's career. But like Powell, Thompson is just another hack looking out for himself.
Meanwhile, on AIDS, Thompson's HHS had claimed it would 'break the back' of the epidemic and would cut new HIV infections in half—just as Bush has promised to cut the deficit in half by 2010—but as of World AIDS Day last week, the HIV infection rate in the United States remained the same, at 40,000 per year, and has risen among young gay and bisexual men. In less than five years, the U.S. has spent $900 million on abstinence-only education, and Bush planned to spend $170 million more on these moralistic, murderous programs, even as he cut spending on other vital AIDS programs domestically.
There are no government education programs telling teens that using a condom goes a long way toward protecting people from sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy. The only government-funded education tells young people to abstain from sexual intercourse until they get married. For gay teens, who still represent a huge amount of new HIV cases—most notably among Blacks and Latinos—that means die and go to hell, or go into some religious 'conversion therapy' to control your homosexual desire. How, after all, can you abstain until marriage if you're not allowed to be married and the president is doing all he can to make sure you can't get married?
Of course, that's if you make it through high school at all without getting bludgeoned by students who've been fed twisted myths about gays and AIDS. Last week we learned that under Thompson, the government told kids in 69 abstinence-only programs in 25 states—programs that reached millions of teenagers—that HIV is spread through tears and sweat, a vicious untruth and a misconception that harkens back to the darkest days of AIDS in the early '80s. The programs, flagged by an analysis by Rep. Henry Waxman that was made public last week, also taught students that half of all gay male teens are infected with HIV, a number that has no basis in fact. The effect of telling kids in elementary and high school—where students are rarely taught anything positive and accepting about homosexuality—that they can get HIV from the sweat dripping from half the homos in gym class is a recipe for gay-bashing. The idea that we're spending millions to expose gay teens to being ostracized and bashed in the name of HIV prevention is revolting. But that's what happens when morality masks as science, as had been allowed to happen in Tommy Thompson's HHS.
Last year it was revealed that college and university researchers were told that they should remove words and phrases like 'gay,' 'lesbian,' 'transgendered' and 'men who have sex with men' from their grant proposals and abstracts if they wanted to get any money for their projects studying STDs and human sexuality, since the religious right capos were breathing down everyone's necks. In the revelation last week about the abstinence-only programs, the Washington Post reported that some of the programs told kids that women who have abortions 'are more prone to suicide,' with 10 percent of them becoming sterile—a claim in complete opposition to the 2001 edition of a standard obstetrics textbook, which says abortion does not affect fertility.
They also told students that touching the genitals 'can result in pregnancy,' and that condoms were ineffective 31 percent of the time, when most studies show a failure rate of three percent for condoms. Lying to kids about sex puts them at greater risk of getting pregnant or infected with HIV and other diseases, since they just won't believe anything after the lies are exposed, and they also obviously aren't getting the facts. How many young people became infected with HIV under Tommy Thompson's reign? Like Colin Powell, he's got a lot of blood on his hands.
Signorile hosts a daily satellite radio show on Sirius OutQ 149. He can be reached at www.signorile.com .
