Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 10, 1994 TAG: 9401110249
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: George F. Will
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Some parents from Staten Island, the sensible borough that is trying to secede from the city, challenged the ``condom availability'' component of the school system's AIDS ``education'' program. They objected not to AIDS education but to the fact that the program contained neither a requirement for prior parental consent, nor even a provision for parents to make their children ineligible for school-dispensed condoms.
The court sided with the parents. It said condom distribution is not a ``health education'' but a ``health service'' program, and hence under state law requires some parental consent. More importantly, the court held that the condom program without parental consent violates the parents' constitutional rights, specifically 14th Amendment due process rights construed to concern the rearing of their children.
The court stressed that condoms are distributed not in clinics away from schools, but in schools, where attendance is compulsory. There is, the court said, no compelling need for schools to act in loco parentis in this sensitive area, creating an environment where children ``will be permitted, even encouraged'' to obtain contraceptive devices, and advised about uses that may be contrary to their parents' fervent beliefs. The court stressed that the parents' complaint was not just that their children were exposed to particular ideas, but that ``the school offers the means for students to engage in sexual activity.''
Condom distribution is the latest chapter in a long story of cultural clashes as old as American schooling. The Supreme Court recognized the liberty interests of parents in directing the rearing and education of their children in 1923, overturning of a Nebraska statute prohibiting the teaching, even in private schools, of foreign languages to children before the ninth grade.
The desire of Nebraska, and other states with comparable wartime laws, was to foster American homogeneity, especially by preventing the teaching of German. The court said this did not justify overriding more fundamental values. In 1925 the court, saying that ``the child is not the mere creature of the state,'' held that Oregon's law compelling children between ages 8 and 16 to attend public schools unreasonably interfered with parental discretion regarding private education.
What New York's court had no judicial occasion to say last month, but what nonetheless needs saying, is suggested by something the court did note. It noted that when schools distribute condoms they are not making available items that are hard to come by, now that condoms are prominently displayed in drug and other stores and cost about as much as a slice of pizza. So what motives drive the condom crusade?
New York City's condom distribution program was instituted solely with reference to AIDS, rather than as a response to the epidemic of teen-age pregnancies. The program is defended with reference to reports that although New York has only 3 percent of the nation's teen-agers, they account for 20 percent of reported cases of adolescent AIDS. However, those numbers do not reveal how much of this results from heterosexual intercourse and how much from needles shared during intravenous drug abuse, or other forms of transmission.
The transmission of AIDS through heterosexual intercourse is not nearly the primary means of transmission. That fact, and the fact that the condom crusade's rationale is exclusively about AIDS rather than illegitimacy, and the fact that the crusade radiates aggressive disdain for parental sovereignty - all this validates a suspicion: The condom distribution program, although justified solely with reference to disease prevention, actually is a tactic of ideological dissemination. It facilitates the campaign to ``democratize'' the public's perception of AIDS, a political program advanced behind such slogans as ``AIDS does not discriminate'' and ``AIDS is an equal opportunity disease.''
This campaign, misleading about the demographics and mechanics of the epidemic, has had the intended effect of making AIDS a spectacularly privileged disease. That is, AIDS receives a share of research resources disproportionate relative to the resources allocated to diseases more costly in lives and less optional, meaning less driven by behaviors known to be risky.
It is difficult to doubt that the public school condom crusade, imposed without provisions for parental consent, appeals to some proponents precisely because it derogates parental authority and expands that of government. These are twin components of a political agenda.
The agenda is to assert equal legitimacy for all ``lifestyles'' or ``preferences,'' and to reduce personal responsibility, under a therapeutic state, for the consequences of choices. In short, this is the 1960s coloring the 1990s.
\ Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB