Don't confuse us with the facts

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 20, 2004

The front-page Boston Globe story begins:

As HIV infections start to climb again among gay men and young adults, the federal government is moving to impose restrictions on AIDS education...

That's a great lead, by Globe standards. You already know the "bad guy" (the federal government), and you can easily identify the "good guys"-- the people who want to stop HIV infections. Why on earth would the government restrict AIDS education? Let's read on. The sentence continues:

...that would require campaigns to discuss the "lack of effectiveness" of condoms and subject explicit materials to high-level scrutiny from state public health authorities ...

Oh. The "restriction" is that the feds want AIDS education to be accurate.

And we still aren't finished with that first sentence:

-- measures that critics argue would impede efforts to prevent the disease.

Now we have the whole picture. Teaching only the facts is a "restrictive" approach. To prevent the spread of disease, we'll need to add a healthy dollop of liberal ideology. And if the facts conflict with the ideology, you know which will have to go.

Phil Lawler has been a Catholic journalist for more than 30 years. He has edited several Catholic magazines and written eight books. Founder of Catholic World News, he is the news director and lead analyst at CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.

Sound Off! CatholicCulture.org supporters weigh in.

All comments are moderated. To lighten our editing burden, only current donors are allowed to Sound Off. If you are a current donor, log in to see the comment form; otherwise please support our work, and Sound Off!

There are no comments yet for this item.