The Bush Theocracy

President Bush’s appointment of his new chief domestic-policy
adviser, Claude Allen — a notorious homophobe, a ferocious enemy of abortion
and an opponent of safe-sex education who for years has been one of the AIDS
community’s principal enemies — is a huge victory for the social reactionaries
of the Christian right.

Allen, who was named to his new position in the White House last
week, had previously been a top aide at the Department of Health and Human Services
(HHS). He was placed there by Karl Rove as a watchdog on then–HHS Secretary
Tommy Thompson, who had an exaggerated reputation as a “moderate”
and who wasn’t entirely trusted by Rove to carry out — by administrative order
— the social agenda of the Christian right, a key part of Rove’s successful
plan to mobilize millions of Christer voters for Bush’s re-election.

Known as Rove’s enforcer, Allen wielded a heavy, censorious and
punitive hand at HHS. In November 2001, Thompson loyally toed the Rove-Bush
line when he put Allen in charge of supervising HHS’s audit of HIV-prevention
spending. Allen led an HHS witch-hunt that investigated all of the AIDS service
organizations (ASOs) receiving any federal funding (like New York City’s Gay
Men’s Health Crisis) whose staff members had disrupted Tommy Thompson’s speech
to the 14th Annual International AIDS Conference in Barcelona; they were there
to protest Bush’s lethal do-nothingism about the AIDS pandemic. These audits
were designed to intimidate ASOs into abandoning AIDS advocacy. A number of
ASOs, like San Francisco’s Stop AIDS Project and half a dozen other California
AIDS-fighting groups, were ultimately purged from receiving U.S. funding by
the Allen-led witch-hunt because Allen didn’t like their science-based sex-education
programs. Allen ordered Advocates for Youth, the leading national coalition
for safe-sex ed, audited half a dozen times.

Moreover, Allen was the driving force to replace science-based
sex ed with the failed policy of teaching that only abstinence prevents AIDS.
A black conservative and religious primitive, Allen helped bludgeon the Centers
for Disease Control, which reports to HHS, into purging safe-sex materials from
its Web sites and into adopting mandatory new rules requiring AIDS-fighting
groups to teach that condoms don’t work in preventing the spread of AIDS, as
I reported in the L.A. Weekly last year (“Condom
Wars,” June 25–July 1). When a federal judge found that a federally
funded Louisiana abstinence program “illegally handed out Bibles, staged anti-abortion
prayer rallies outside women’s clinics and had students perform Bible-based
skits,” Allen refused to have the program audited, while continuing his repeated
audit persecutions of effective AIDS-fighting groups teaching condom use.

Allen also enforced his abstinence-only line when he was commissioner
of Health and Human Services for Virginia under right-wing GOP Governor Jim
Gilmore. There, too, he bent public health priorities to the religious right’s
agenda, and led a state-sponsored anti–safe sex crusade that he cooked up with
a kooky abstinence-only Christer outfit called the Institute for Youth Development,
which also claims that condoms don’t work to prevent AIDS and teaches children
to fear, rather than understand, sex. As Allen said then of condom use, “It’s
like telling your child, ‘Don’t use the car,’ but then leaving the keys in the
Lamborghini and saying, ‘But if you do, buckle up.’”

Allen’s history as a gay-baiter goes back to his days as a top
aide to the notorious homophobe Senator Jesse Helms. In 1984, Allen accused
Helms’ Democratic challenger, then-Governor James Hunt, of having links to “queers,”
“radical feminists,” socialists and unions (Hunt was, in fact, a Bible-quoting
right-wing Dem.) And Allen forged his odious reputation as a black capo for
the racist right when he continued working for Helms despite the senator’s militant
opposition to making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.

Notorious for his anti-abortion stance, at HHS Allen helped use
its regulatory powers to turn Title 10 of the Public Services Act — which Bush
père had championed — away from family planning and the promotion of
condom use and into an abstinence-only program. In his Virginia years, Allen’s
Christian-right extremism led him to endanger the health of children. Then Allen
worked to defeat legislation that provided health insurance for children of
the working poor, largely because the program covered abortion services for
rape and incest victims under the age of 18. “When the law was ultimately
enacted, Allen was faulted for not enrolling children quickly enough, and admitted
that ‘abortion was the sticking point’ delaying the enrollment of children,”
as People for the American Way (and civil rights groups like the NAACP) pointed
out last fall when they successfully opposed Bush’s nomination of Allen for
a federal judgeship. “In this episode, Allen proved himself to be so adamantly
opposed to reproductive rights that he found it preferable for poor children
to go without health coverage than to risk an underage sexual-abuse victim having
access to state-funded abortion services.”

The appointment of Allen as domestic-policy czar is further
evidence of the aggressive new push for the Christian right’s social agenda
in Bush’s second term. In the first term, $1.7 billion was handed out in patronage
disguised as “faith-based initiatives.” Now, the Washington Post
reported on January 4, the White House is launching a major new offensive (with
Allen, in his new post, in charge) to persuade states to use an additional $50
billion in federal moneys to subsidize “faith-based” programs — money
that has been shorn of church-state separation restrictions by a Bush executive
order, without the approval of Congress. This amounts to a religious tax on
the American people. Half a dozen Democratic governors have already joined in
capitulating to the religious right’s agenda by appointing coordinators of “faith-based”
services. At the same time, The New York Times reported on January
9 that the White House has prepared new legislation putting stringent caps on
a whole host of federal benefit programs — from Medicare to prescription drug
benefits — meaning that many poor Americans will be forced to rely on the states
for help. And, when the new “faith-based” offensive succeeds, in many
states they’ll only be able to get that help from religious-sponsored institutions
funded by the states with federal moneys.

Welcome to the American theocracy — of which Claude Allen is the
newest public face.

Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at
https://direland.typepad.com/direland/

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