By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)
August 17, 2001
For some time I have reported that liberals are simply refusing to admit facts, or to face the realities of those facts, even when they cause people to die. Yesterday, I received two reports on two very different liberal positions that illustrate what is happening when the truth proves the error of a liberal position. What generally happens is denial. Often the denial comes in the form of an attack on the person pointing out the liberal shortcomings. Both reports involve cover-up of taxpayer-financed information. However, the taxpayers are being denied the right to learn about the information, if it contradicts politically correct thinking.
In one case, groups representing over 10,000 doctors have accused the Centers for Disease Control of covering up the government's own research that shows that condoms do not protect individuals from most sexually transmitted diseases. The other case involves the liberal majority on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission covering up its own minority report which points to facts, rather than racist propaganda in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida.
First I received the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute weekly fax which provided a statement issued by the Physicians Consortium, that includes retired Congressman Tom Coburn, M.D., Congressman Dave Weldon, M.D. and the Catholic Medical Association. The Consortium reported that
"...the CDC has systematically hidden and misrepresented vital medical information regarding the ineffectiveness of condoms to prevent the transmission of STDs. The CDCs refusal to acknowledge clinical research has contributed to the massive STD epidemic.The charges stem from the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) release of the "Workshop Summary" on condom effectiveness, a paper written in June 2000 by HHS, the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. According to the physicians groups, this government research found no clinical proof that condoms offer protection from most STDs, such as herpes, syphilis and chylamydia.
Instead of reporting these findings to the public, the physicians groups claim that the CDC attempted to conceal the paper and to delay its release. The CDC also demanded revisions to the Workshop Summary in order to create "...unwarranted confusion and misinformation to what otherwise is a clear-cut repudiation of condom effectiveness."
The paper's most serious findings involve the STD Human Papillomavirus (HPV). The paper's authors state that "There was no epidemiological evidence that condom use reduced the risk of HPV infection..." According to Dr. Richard Klausner, the Director of the National Cancer Institute, HPV causes over 90 percent of all cases of cervical cancer. Every year, more than 200,000 women, including 5000 American women, die of cervical cancer.
The federal government knew of this HPV risk even earlier. A 1996 NIH "Consensus Statement" on Cervical Cancer reports that "The data on the use of barrier methods of contraception to prevent the spread of HPV...does not support this as an effective method of prevention..." The CDC has apparently ignored this information for at least five years.
The physicians groups are calling for the resignation of the Director of the CDC, Dr. Jeffrey P. Koplan. In light of these findings, some conservative critics raise other questions: is the "safe sex" message truly based upon the science of disease-prevention? Since cervical cancer claims the lives of more American women than AIDS, can the promotion of condom use be considered pro-women? Finally, should the US, as well as the UN, fund condom-distribution worldwide, especially in countries that lack the basic medical services to diagnose and treat HPV before it results in cervical cancer? As the 1996 Consensus Statement concludes, "Worldwide, cervical cancer is second only to breast cancer as the most common malignancy in both incidence and mortality. More than 471,000 new cases are diagnosed each year, predominantly among the economically disadvantaged..." The UN is the largest distributor of condoms in the world.
This kind of cover-up isn't just inconvenient. It is causing people to die. And, in Africa the problem of condoms' ineffectiveness is not just HPV. In two separate conferences in 1999 and 2000 I interviewed two women activists from Africa, Carol Ugochukwu, President of United Families of Africa in Enugu, Nigeria (http://www.bannerofliberty.com/OS7-00MQC/7-13-2000.1.html) and Dr. Margaret Ogala of Kenya about the massive UN program to distribute condoms in their countries. Last year the interview with Carol Ugochukwu included this exchange:
Mary Mostert: I'd like to ask you another question before we go back in. Would you just tell my readers how the push from the West on birth control, smaller families, what that has done to your African culture in your particular area? Has it encouraged the young people to look at sex differently?Carol Ugochukwu: Actually, it has devastated our culture. It is taboo for a girl to have a child out of wedlock. It was never, never done in our culture. We in Africa believe in abstinence. That is our culture. You do not have sex until you are married and marriage is so precious and we have many intermediate stages before you get married.
(For the entire interview: http://www.bannerofliberty.com/OS7-00MQC/7-13-2000.1.html)
But today, they (Westerners) now come in with condoms - condoms are everywhere! They spend so much money on condoms and they make our children promiscuous. They say it will stop AIDS - but it is getting worse! It makes no sense to me. It is making the whole situation worse.
Dr. Ogala pointed out that the heat, lack of running water, re-use of condoms and what she believed to be inferior products sent to Africa, combined with the UN campaign that condom use is "safe sex" is spreading AIDS which has killed 14 million Africans so far.
The other issue involves the by United States Commission on Civil Rights of the Florida Election Report Dissenting Statement by Commissioners Abigail Thernstrom and Russell G. Redenbaugh. The Democrat majority of commissioners issued a report, without even referring to the minority findings, which categorically stated that Florida's black voters were "disenfranchised." The minority reported the exact opposite, saying that the Commission report entitled Voting Irregularities Occurring in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election
" is prejudicial, divisive, and injurious to the cause of true democracy and justice in our society. It discredits the Commission itself and substantially diminishes its credibility as the nation's protector of our civil rights."The Commission's report has little basis in fact. Its conclusions are based on a deeply flawed statistical analysis coupled with anecdotal evidence of limited value, unverified by a proper factual investigation. This shaky foundation is used to justify charges of the most serious nature-questioning the legitimacy of the American electoral process and the validity of the most recent presidential election. The report's central finding-that there was "widespread disenfranchisement and denial of voting rights" in Florida's 2000 presidential election-does not withstand even a cursory legal or scholarly scrutiny. Leveling such a serious charge without clear justification is an unwarranted assault upon the public's confidence in American democracy.
The statistical analysis in the report is superficial and incomplete. A more sophisticated regression analysis by Dr. John Lott, an economist at Yale Law School, challenges its main findings. Dr. Lott was unable to find a consistent, statistical significant relationship between the share of voters who were African Americans and the ballot spoilage rate.
The minority members said that they were denied access to any of the statistical data used for the report and that Commission chairman, Frances Berry also refused to make public their minority report in what they described as a "naked political act of silencing the voice of dissenting members of the commission." After Thernstrom and Redenbaugh threatened to sue, Berry buried their report so well that you have to know how to find it in order to read it. And, of course, it has not been mentioned by most of the media. (It's at: http://www.usccr.gov/vote2000/stdraft1/dissent.htm )
What should our response to this sort of cover-up be? Of course, first it illustrates that liberals are, for the first time, really afraid of what is taking place. They are losing control of the public's mind and they apparently realize it. Their only hope is to keep the public ignorant on these issues. In both cases, the truth contradicts liberal Democrat positions. If condoms really don't work, that will certainly undermine the 1960s notions of free sex. It's not free if it ends up killing you. And, of course, if there really was no effort to keep blacks from voting in Florida, that undermines the huge sums of money the professional race-baiting blacks have managed to get from taxpayers for decades.
It's interesting to watch the reaction of the Baby Boomer generation, which prided itself in rejecting everything their parents thought they were teaching them about morals and loyalty to country, to being pushed aside as irrelevant by much of the younger generation. They don't seem to be nearly as tolerant of dissent as their parents were back in the 1960s.
To comment: mmostert@bannerofliberty.com