Janice Shaw Crouse of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute is outraged that the government is studying sexual behavior and the rate of sexually transmitted infections. In fact, Crouse is upset that the government is using the term “sexually transmitted infection (STI),” which the health community believes is the most accurate term since sexually transmitted diseases are infections that show symptoms. She is also upset that the terms “straight,” “gay,” and “lesbian” were included in the study.
Crouse is even angered that the survey found that, indeed, straight people contract STI’s and HIV. According to Crouse, any study of STI’s is part of a twisted plan concocted by the Obama Administration and the “homosexual lobby” to promote the “homosexual agenda”:
Note that, under the Obama administration, statisticians have adopted the use of STIs instead of STDs (sexually transmitted infections rather than sexually transmitted diseases). Representatives of Planned Parenthood and SEICUS told me, when I asked at a meeting about the difference between the two terms, that “infections” carry less of a stigma than a “disease,” because “anybody can get an infection, but a disease is more serious and carries a connotation of blame.”
While the focus ostensibly is on STIs, there are 10 graphs of same-sex attraction, sexual identity, sexual behavior, and sexual activity. All this attention produced evidence, not surprisingly, that 86 percent of HIV cases are acquired through sexual behavior (others acquire HIV through transmission from an infected spouse or partner, or from a pregnant mother to her baby) and that the cost of the 50,000 new cases of HIV each year is approximately $20,000 per person. Amazingly, (is this really necessary?) the study noted that, in addition to terms such as “heterosexual” and “homosexual,” they used the terms, “straight,” “gay” and “lesbian” so that respondents could easily “recognize” the meaning.
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Clearly, the intent of this report is to document same-sex attraction, identification, behavior, and activity, rather than to report on sexually-transmitted diseases. Is this a sign of the times, or a calculated effort of the Obama administration to continue pushing the homosexual agenda? Or both? Is it really the federal government’s responsibility, and a good use of taxpayer money, to mine survey data to try to support the homosexual lobby’s claim that “we are everywhere” and “anybody can get HIV?”
Apparently Crouse has a problem with science: as this study documents, straight people are able to contract HIV, along with all other STI’s. While she says that the government should instead “report on sexually-transmitted diseases” (which it does), one of the best ways to learn about the transmission of STI’s is to learn about sexual behavior. Crouse could have learned this by reading the second sentence of the first paragraph of the study: “These behaviors and characteristics are relevant to birth and pregnancy rates, as well as the incidence of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).”
Moreover, she believes the Obama Administration is responsible for this outrageous research, but the National Survey of Family Growth conducted it from 2006-2008, under the Bush Administration.
This demonstrates another example of shoddy reporting from CWA’s “resident expert.”
