The Republican STD Fetish

by Michael Jones · 2009-01-28 20:01:00 UTC
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CongressSeventeen years ago, Sen. Jesse Helms had a condom put on his Virginia house because of his atrocious ability to exploit efforts to prevent STDs and fund HIV/AIDS initiatives and drugs.

Seventeen years later, the Republicans still just don't get it, as evidenced by their threat today to 29 Freshman Democrats.  In a release put out by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) today right before the vote in the U.S. House on the stimulus package, the NRCC tried to dissuade freshman Democrats from voting for the package because (gasp!) the package contained "$335 million to fund prevention programs of sexually transmitted diseases."

Since when is funding the prevention of STDs something to hang over the heads of political opponents?  Shouldn't preventing disease and promoting public health be a celebrated function of the government?

One last question: is this the most incompetent Republican party we've ever seen?  That might be the case, as Politico's reporting one Democratic official as saying.  "It speaks volumes about the overall health of the Republican Party that they are getting their ideas from the Drudge Report and their mouthpiece is Rush Limbaugh."

The stimulus bill passed 244-188 in the U.S. House, with no GOP support whatsoever. Eleven Democrats also voted with the GOP against the bill, including several who received the STD threat email from the NRCC (no word on whether or not this email from the NRCC was the deciding factor in their vote).

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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