You’ve got to love those wacky Bush Administration members. The Washington Post reports that deputy Secretary of State Robert Tobias had to resign yesterday after ABC News cornered him about using an escort service that is being investigated for prostitution (Rice Deputy quits ).
Tobias admited he used the service, but only for “massages.”
Tobias was a big proponent of the Bush administration’s abstinence-only policy and tried to apply it to the AIDS/HIV epidemic in Africa.
“What the Ugandans have proven is that if you can get young people — and the results show that you can — to understand how AIDS is spread and to delay the age at which they become sexually active, and then if you can get people who are sexually active to reduce hopefully to one the number of partners, they have proven to be the two most effective approaches to prevention.” Tobias added, “The message to young people in the schools is not either ‘Be abstinent or here are condoms, take your pick.’ It is a message of ‘Be abstinent.’ Delaying sexual activity is a means of eliminating the risk of infection.” (Agence France-Presse, 4/22/04).
Today 25 million people live with HIV in Africa. Abstinence-only doesn’t seem to be working very well there.
Maybe the new policy should be “More massages, less sex”