Bush's war on sex.

• Author: Wright, Kai

Few of the public health workers who crammed into the back of a tiny White House conference room this March would have ever guessed they'd watch such a show unfold. There before them sat Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, quietly presiding over the inaugural meeting of the Bush White House's Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. Coburn directed the proceedings with an eerie, atypical reserve, rarely interjecting, and then only to make statements such as, "My job here is to build consensus." It's an unlikely charge for the self-styled gadfly.

Most sexual health experts had discreetly sighed in relief when Coburn kept his vow to serve only three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. Entering the political scene as part of the GOP'S conservative revolution in 1994, he exited in 2001 as the AIDS activists' staunchest foe. While in office, Coburn spent much of his time on Capitol Hill undermining HIV prevention programs and promoting sexual health campaigns that teach only abstinence until marriage. His parting shot was to order up a National Institutes of Health report questioning the effectiveness of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. Released last July, the document stated the obvious: that, when properly used, condoms dramatically reduce the chance of transmitting most, but not all, sexually transmitted diseases.

Coburn breathlessly declared it proof that "the term `safe sex' is a myth" and suggested that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was engaged in a criminal conspiracy to hide that fact. Now Bush has brought Coburn back to Washington to chair the nation's premier advisory body on federal AIDS policy. "When you look at the caliber of conservatives that Bush is appointing," groans Marcela Howell, public affairs director of Advocates for Youth, "what you get is people who really want to turn the clock back."

Few people realize just how far right the Bush Administration is moving on health. "Everyone knows that the Administration's not pro-choice," says National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association policy director Marilyn Keefe. "What people don't know is the damage that could be done to the public health infrastructure during this Administration." Keefe notes the White House's "terrible overlap" with rightwing political groups whose ambitions stretch way past fighting abortion and into redefining our basic understandings of what constitutes sexual health, particularly among youth. Indeed, Bush's chief advisor Karl...