A hope-based reality
As I was skimming the headlines on World AIDS Day today, I started thinking about how the current administration’s dogma is hampering efforts to effectively curb the disease: its insistence on abstinence-based sex programs is no help at all.
Then it hit me. For all of Colbert’s satire of neocons’ disdain of liberals’ “fact-based reality”, Bush & co are living in a “hope-based reality” of their own. Think about it: they want folks to heed their no-sex-outside-of-marriage and hope that will be enough for the unplanned pregnancy/STD issue to go away. Human nature has shown that the sex drive is so strong that people will often ignore, subvert, or rationalize away any moral codes to the contrary (exhibit A: Ted Haggard). A policy that pins its success on the hope that it will succeeded in changing human behavior where thousands of years of proscriptions have been ineffectual is doomed to fail.
The problem is more fundamental than that, though. Good engineering and good management require a failsafe approach: there has to be a fallback. Even the fallback itself may fail, so the infrastructure must be agile enough to adapt to situations as needed. In the sex-ed debate, advocating abstinence is one thing (and ethically questionable at that: why should the government be involved in that most personal of decisions?). Having the whole AIDS/STD/pregnancy prevention strategy resting entirely on abstinence is another: if people don’t heed the abstinence message, what’s the plan then? Moreover, how do you gauge progress? How do you adapt your strategy?
Of course, this is just one facet of a larger dogmatic issue. Consider the appointment of a family planning czar who doesn’t believe in birth control. Consider neocons’ opposition to abortion. Consider their opposition to non-procreative sex. These speak of a negligent vision, completely removed from reality, that relies on preaching to curb “undesirable” behavior and punishes those who do not hew to the straight(!) and narrow. And that’s the best case. If you’re really cynical, you’d think the plutocrats are paying lip service to social issues (while pinning the policy failures on the supposed beneficiaries themselves for failing to be properly pure and moral) while really creating a large underclass of poor worker bees to prop up their profits.