The pope, a venerable leader throughout the Christian world, says don’t do it. Tony Williams, the mayor of Washington, D.C., says, please, indulge yourself. Whose advice would you follow?
Both the pope and the politician are speaking of promiscuity in general and HIV/AIDS in particular. Monday, as part of World AIDS Day, while Pope John Paul II and theRoman Catholic Church were warning us against hedonistic lifestyles, the mayor and other lefties were promoting condoms. Renew your D.C. driver’s license and pick up a condom when you’re done. Boogie the night away at one of the city’s hot spots and grab a condom in the ladies room before you hit the door. Got your eye on a sweet young thing, but don’t have the dough to buy condoms? Stop by your neighborhood barbershop and pick up a few for free.
Thanks to the activists, who, for all practical purposes, reject any notion that abstaining from sex is the only surefire behavior to ward off HIV/AIDS and other consequences, condom-mania has taken the nation’s capital by storm. Free condoms are literally everywhere. The mayor’s point man on HIV/AIDS calls the city’s initiative a “partnership” with beauty and barber shops, and clubs, bars and restaurants around the city. D.C. government offices will be dispensing condoms, too. The DMV holds you hostage with its morass and D.C. lawmakers can’t figure out how to reform the school system. But dispense condoms? No problem.
Gone are the days when men had to visit a drug store to buy condoms — behind the counter and next to the nudie mags. Nothing is hush-hush. Everything (disgusting and morally wrong) is out in the open.
The D.C. government’s liberal policies encourage pregnant teens to strut with their huge bellies, worrying not one iota about who will nurture her off-spring because there always is a good government program to take care of them. And the child’s father needn’t worry either. After all, he can choose not to use condoms, even freebies.
Yep, it’s all about choices. The D.C. flock and the school system chose to push condom usage in the name of safe sex, while the safe-sexers blaspheme both the message and the messengers.
The condom campaigns, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barrigan said on World AIDS Day, “foster immoralandhedonistic lifestyles and behavior, favoring the spread of evil.”
The safe-sexers don’t want to hear such moralizing. They want the church and policy-makers to do as they say. It’s a dangerous play-along, and the folks we elect to city halls and Capitol Hill love the game. The conservatives are scared to have faith in the abstinence message for fear of being labeled the Righteous Right. Democrats have taken to saying “right on” to whatever and punctuating their rhetoric with two snaps of their fingers. Anything goes so long as they get your vote.
In Washington, public schools no longer teach health education, and with so many parents AWOL, the bureaucrats are free to run amok. Health education has become sex education. With one hand, they snatch children out of class because they don’t have up-to-date immunizations, and with the other hand they push a condom into children’s palms.
Shame on Tony Williams, who was reared in the Catholic Church. During his own summit on education, Mr. Williams sat on the dais and looked cross-eyed at two young activists who proposed the very safe-sex programs that his Health Department has now implemented vis a vis condom giveaways.
If the mayor dares to watch City Cable 16, his government’s station, he will see me chastising him on the air as well. As a matter of fact, it was during the taping of “Reporters Roundtable” where I really blew my stack. There we were, fresh off a segment with a Christian organization called Covenant House Washington, which aids troubled teens, and what does the moderator of the show do? She whips out a “Conpact,” a makeup compact. Only it doesn’t contain makeup. It holds a condom and a colorful how-to booklet.
“Wrong,” I said. It is wrong for government to promote condoms.
Condom promotion has its place. But the government should not be its chief promoter, encouraging bad behavior. Handing out free condoms and clean needles is as bad as giving money to a dope fiend.
It is called enabling. It enables druggies to keep getting high instead of getting clean. It enables hedonists and those who indulge in bestiality to continue their immoral acts.
It is wrong.
But it keeps the bureaucrats employed.
Having received much grief in the past for pointing out such wrongs, I thought I had learned my lesson. But when the so-called HIV/AIDS activists get the best of a Christian like Mayor Tony Williams, it’s time to speak out again.
