Society may be catching on. Addressing a rally against AIDS here in Little Rock, a guest speaker mentioned that parents must talk to children “about abstinence as the best means of protection against AIDS.”
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There was a time when abstinence seemed only an afterthought in the fight against AIDS; now it gets top billing even in this condomized culture. That’s progress.
The speaker was Lance Alworth Jr., an official with the Clinton administration. So he had to add that kids should also be informed about condoms “in the event that they make the wrong decision.”
But condoms are part of the wrong decision. Here’s hoping parents do inform kids about condoms, not simply endorse the things. Let’s hope parents mention the failure rate of condoms, especially the more defective kind that the state of Arkansas was handing out not long ago under the aegis of Joycelyn Elders, M.D.
Alworth compared telling kids about condoms to the advice his parents gave him as a teenager: They told him not to drink alcohol but, if he did, to call them, and they would pick him up rather than have him drive.
That’s good parenting. Alworth is fortunate to have had the benefit of good advice. Such counsel is also not a bad way to handle the danger of AIDS. Any kid about to engage in sexual intercourse would do well to call the folks and ask for a ride home instead. In terms of effectiveness, so simple a technique would probably beat all heck out of using a condom.
There’s a deadly plague on, and any measures less than sure are not enough.
After a decade of the plague, medicine has developed some temporary palliatives (AZT and other toxic nucleoside analogues) but those are not cures. At best they provide only pauses in what till now has been the invariable progression of a sure, fatal, painful disease.
At this point, about a million Americans are said to be infected with HIV; all are expected to develop AIDS.
It is estimated that, by the end of 1994, almost half a million Americans will have developed full-fledged AIDS.
AIDS already has killed more than 200,000 Americans and the toll mounts daily. By 1994, it’s estimated that the death toll will top 350,000.
At last estimate, 57 percent of the AIDS cases in this country could be traced to homosexual sex, a drop from 61 percent in 1989. Some 23 percent of the cases are now said to stem from the use of intravenous drugs, up slightly from 21 percent in 1989.
According to the World Health Organization, more than 13 million adults and a million children around the world are infected.
Anyone who contracts AIDS today has got a fatal disease. It may be slow-acting. A vaccine may be developed for it, perhaps in the next century. But at present AIDS is not curable.
AIDS is not a little something that can be cleared up with an antibiotic, or shrugged off with an embarrassed smile and some platitude about sowing wild oats.
The fatal danger of AIDS-no, the fatal certainty of AIDS-is not a topic to be mentioned once and then dropped, or an afterthought to be voiced following an endorsement of condoms.
We’re talking life and death here. And all those who have left the impression that it’s OK, or permissible, or not too bad, to risk AIDS by relying on some less-than-sure protection-like a condom-are on the side of death. It’s as simple and terrible as that.
When it comes to risking AIDS, this country needs a policy of zero tolerance.
Instead, are we are pushing risky behavior under the guise of recommending a prophylactic?
Think about it. Condom ads are common. But where are the other ads? The signs that should say: “Would you bet your life on a thin sheet of latex? Don’t be a fool. Don’t be a dead fool.”
Where are the the kind of warnings that made smoking unfashionable in this society?
Where is the kind of vast, style-setting public relations effort that made cigarettes gauche?
Why aren’t the ever-present media being used to create a new fashion of health for young people-one that emphasizes restraint? A style that stresses respect for one’s self and for one’s life? Where are the public-service announcements, the movies, the pop lyrics, the rap songs pushing safety, health and life?
How much school time is devoted to encouraging the practice of sexual continence? Not much compared to instruction in the use of condoms, which has become part of the standard curriculum.
Parents should be telling their children, and not just in passing, that condomized sex is not the safe sex it has been widely and falsely advertised to be. It’s more like playing Russian roulette for the highest stakes.
The same message should be coming from teachers, doctors, nurses, coaches, youth workers and anybody else who has the kids’ welfare in mind-the kids’ lives in mind.
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Young people should be told there isn’t a cure in sight. Not because the enemy is some vicious homophobic plot, or one president or another, but because the enemy is a virus that appears to be mutating faster than science can develop a vaccine against it. The human immunodeficiency virus is proving not only a killer but a subtle, mutable, intractable killer.
Young people should be told to take no chances with this thing. Then told again. At length. With statistics, graphs and pictures.
Or has sexuality become the unquestionable icon of our society, and celibacy the taboo? And monogamy a curiosity?
Are we still holding on to the old yet always enticing fallacy that no matter how we behave, there will never be any unpleasant consequences? That in the 20th Century there’s always a technical fix, that no one need ever fail, and that no mistake is final?
The sexual revolution is nothing new; it’s the same old heedless anarchy that has destroyed families since time immemorial. But now there’s a new urgency to the old warning that the wages of sin is death.
If the sound of the King James Version offends some folks, then forget the morality angle. Just push quaint sexual practices like chastity and faithfulness as the latest advances in public health.