Back in the USSA

[avram]

When I was a kid, back in the long-ago 1970s, the world’s Big Bad Guy was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or just “the Russians”. I was given a litany of reasons the USSR were the bag guys. The least convincing of them, but most often repeated (because I went to a private Jewish school, and the plight of Soviet Jewry, discriminated against but forbidden to leave, was on the minds of most American Jews) was that people there weren’t free to worship as they pleased. This wasn’t a complaint I took very seriously, because I suffered the same thing here in the free US: I wanted to live as an atheist, and my family forced me to live as a Jew.

But the other complaints still remain in my mind as signifiers of an unfree society: Soviets needed to show identity papers to travel within their own nation, they could be arrested in the middle of the night and shipped off somewhere without being formally charged or given access to a lawyer, and Soviet science was distorted for political purposes (look up Lysenkoism for one well-known example).

You know where this is going, don’t you? Fast forward to 2002. Americans need to show identity papers to travel within their own country — there are office buildings in NYC that you won’t be allowed into without a photo ID! American citizens can be held indefinitely without being charged or allowed to talk with their lawyer, on mere suspicion of wrongdoing without physical evidence.

And today, in Jon Carroll’s column, I read of the latest outrage: science being distorted to fit a pseudo-conservative political agenda (“pseudo-” because true conservatives believe in things like truth and fiscal responsibility and the value of honest labor, while the Bush administration and its supporters merely give lip service to those virtues in the pursuit of secrecy and easy wealth and political patronage and naked power):

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that there was no link between abortions and breast cancer. It said so on its Web site. Conservative Republicans made it remove that information. Why? Because pro-life groups have been using that "fact" to scare women seeking abortions.

This isn’t the first such news I’ve encountered. The administration has been terminating scientific advisory committees that produce results it disagrees with, and there was the mapping specialist fired for posting maps to the Net that showed caribou migration and calving areas inside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But this is the first I’d heard of the claim of a link between abortion and breast cancer, so I googled for more info. Turns out that the NIH had a page about it, which was removed, but has been restored. (There’s an independent backup, courtesy of TheMemoryHole.org, in case it gets purged again. And still more backups of purged CDC pages.)

What really pissed me off, though, was this page on TraditionalValues.org (not my tradition, you bastards) accusing the Clinton administration of perpetrating politically-motivated science for allowing the CDC to post pro-condom material on its website. Their argument is based around refutation of a strawman — they claim that talk of “safe sex” implies a claim that condoms are 100% effective in protecting against disease, a claim nobody would make who’s thought about the matter for any length of time.

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

they claim that talk of “safe sex” implies a claim that condoms are 100% effective

Then they turn around and claim that abstinence is effective, when it's been repeatedly proven that teens who get abstinence-only sex education are highly at risk for STDs, pregnancy, etc., because when they fall, they fall hard.