Just Curious

Damn those interest groups!

As a disenchanted political observer, I have come to the conclusion that all politicians are beholden to diverse interest groups. Gone is the age when lawgivers (in Rousseauian terms) like Moses, Hammurabi, Confucius, Muhammad, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon and Lenin shaped the polity according to the social realities their societies faced as understood by their own conscience.

A good example would be the policy debate on abstinence-only sex-education. Social-Conservatives want a curriculum that would exclude any practical instructions on the using of contraceptive methods, and social-liberals want parts of the curriculum that stress (rightly) the superiority of abstinence to contraception as means of birth-control & STD-prevention. More disturbing is conservatives insistence in stressing the failure rates of condoms and liberals' insistence on stressing the success rates of condoms and the moral acceptability of teen-age abortion.

It has become rather clear to me that conservative are beholden to religious groups and liberals to condom manufacturers, abortion clinics and various mega-capitalists-the pornographers. My question to these people is: where is your conscience? For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. No one can serve two masters, for he will hate one of them and love the other: you cannot serve both truth and money. Their conscience, it seems to me, is on the Christian-right vote, on right-wing donations, and on donations made by abortion doctors, condom manufacturers and pornographers.

Fine. If they don't want to serve ordinary people like us, who want our kids learn both the efficiencies & moralities of abstinence and contraception (for I don't have to be ignorant about condoms to recognize the superiority of abstinence as an alternative method to STD-prevention), we don't want them to remain in office either. It is time for us to write to the conservative Deputy Secretary Claude Allen of the Health Department & Congressman Henry Waxman the arch-opponent of abstinence-education.

posted by James Chang @ 9:48 PM