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Saturday, April 02, 2005

More extremely bad policy

I know that cool people are fighting this idiocy with mockery (good strategy) but I am too outraged to laugh. Here is propaganda from the US government to parents

"I heard a commercial on the radio about always being prepared by having condoms. Do you or your friends think that condoms really make sex safe?"

The message to US parents is clear. It is made much clearer by the context of other entries on the same page. For example

"That song has a good beat, but the song makes it seem like having sex makes you a man (or woman). Do you think that's true?"

It is clear that US public money is being spent to promote the view that talking about "always being prepared by having condoms" is like saying "having sex makes you a man (or woman)." The proposed question "Do you or your friends think that condoms really make sex safe?" conflates "absolutely safe" and "safer" and "enough safer that people who insult condoms are enemies of humanity" (my answers no yes and yes).

How about this one "I hear that over at the Bush administration their proposal for avoiding AIDS is to save it till the wedding night and then have sex only with your spouse. Do you think that at least one monogamous person has cought HIV from his or (more likely) her spouse ? Do you think that sex with your spouse is totally safe ? Do you know what he/she is doing all the time ?"

The same argument that sex with condoms is not totally safe (true) implies that sex is never totally safe (no real world probability is 100%).

Notice I didn't bother with "so, junior, do you think that there is a chance in hell you will follow this advice, or should we just ignore that stupid web site?"

I award the authors of the site the Thabo Mbeki award for almost making me wish that DARPA hadn't invented the internet.

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