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.