The dilemma: You own a revolver. You want to load it for protection, but you also want it unloaded for safety. The solution: Load only one round, then spin the cylinder. If you accidentally pull the trigger, five chambers are empty. And if you are assaulted, you still have one bullet to stop the attacker. With this gun you enjoy complete protection and safety, right?
Wrong. To ensure safety, you must unload the gun. And to be reliably used for protection, the gun must be fully loaded. Any compromise is just Russian roulette.
Who would propose such an absurd plan for gun safety? Perhaps the same people who gave us the public-awareness campaign for so-called ”safe sex.”
Avoid AIDS, they tell us; use condoms. You`d never guess that we`re really being advised to play Russian roulette.
Used with care, condoms can be up to 97 percent effective in preventing pregnancy. But in the urgency of a passionate moment, few of us are that meticulous. In the real world, the effectivity rate of condoms is closer to 84 percent. Let`s assume condoms are just as effective in preventing HIV infection (a large assumption, since we don`t yet fully know how the virus is transmitted). This means, even using condoms, there is still a 16 percent chance of catching the virus from an infected partner. That`s a one-in-six chance-the same odds of surviving after pointing a revolver with one loaded round at your head and pulling the trigger.
Is this ”safe sex”?
Past public awareness campaigns have served nobly at reliably educating people about threats to the public health. Slogans like ”Cocaine: the Big Lie” and ”Just Say No” generally turned around the public perception of the glamor of taking drugs. But the safe sex campaign is promoting a lie rather than exposing one: ”Safe sex” is possible if we simply educate people about the proper precautions.
And while we try to educate the problem away, the HIV virus continues to spread. Apart from homosexuals, those at greatest risk are teenagers-evidenced by 1.2 million teenage pregnancies annually. One ”solution” now being attempted is to distribute free condoms to high-school students.
Dr. Robert Noble, an infectious-diseases physician specializing in AIDS treatment at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, says of this effort: ”Passing out condoms to teenagers is like issuing squirt guns for a four-alarm fire. Condoms just don`t hack it. We should stop kidding ourselves.”
The fact is, there is only one way to have completely safe sex. You and your partner must both obtain a clean bill of health through a blood test, and then you must remain completely faithful to each other.
Unfortunately, that sounds frighteningly like the ”m” word (read either ”marriage” or ”monogamy”). And the safe-sex people are afraid that saying ”Condoms: the Big Lie” or ”Just Say No” will lead you to believe they are promoting a moral issue rather than a health issue. And ”morality” is the other ”m” word when it comes to sex.
Restriction of sexual freedom is not a popular message, and we tend to get exasperated with those who ”preach” it. We roll our eyes when someone raises the moral argument. We smugly label them as meddlers, Puritans, prudes. We attack them as Moral Majority types, self-righteous and holier-than-thou.
And in doing this, we ourselves become hypocrites. For we never attempt to divorce morality from other issues as we do from sex. ”You can`t legislate morality” is the old saying. But, in fact, we legislate it all the time. We pass laws against murder, against theft, against perjury-never admitting that we`ve merely restated in 20th Century legalese the
ancient moral precepts, ”Thous shalt not murder,” Thou shalt not steal,”
”Thou shalt not bear false witness.”
When an innocent person is wantonly killed, most of us don`t have to work at summoning up a sense of moral outrage. It comes unbidden. It`s a by-product of our moral awareness. It`s what sets us apart from all other species on this planet. We naturally feel angry at injustice, empathy for
victims; these are the animus behind most criminal law.
But we don`t often want the moral argument raised where sex is concerned. Those who associate morality with sexual restraint are considered repressive, backward and priggish. And though public health, rather than sexual morality, is the impetus behind the safe-sex campaign, it is fear of this ”moral majority” characterization that has directed the thrust of the campaign toward the least safe of the available options: condom use. The safest options, abstinence and monogamy, are too tainted as ”old-fashioned moral virtues.” They aren`t ”enlightened” and ”progressive.”
So we`re stuck in a dangerous trap. The best way to prevent the spread of AIDS requires telling people what they don`t want to hear. It risks being stigmatized as a ”moral advocacy.” Well, maybe it is. The moral issue is there whether or not we acknowledge it. Even laying aside the questions of premarital and extramarital sex, we must still ask ourselves whether it is moral to tell people that it`s safe to play with a partially loaded gun because the odds that it will go off in your face are only one in six.
The safe-sex campaign is a worthy effort, but it desperately needs redirection. To offer people real information about genuinely safe sex and the prevention of AIDS, the taboo against discussing sex in anything other than morally neutral terms must be jettisoned. The moral dimension must be addressed. We cannot be afraid to say that sex outside of a committed, monogamous relationship is wrong. And such a relationship is really marriage, even without the sanction of church or state.
The terms are absolutely clear: The potential cost of unrestricted sex is slow, wasting death by disease. Abstinence and monogamy must be pushed to the forefront of the AIDS discussion, not just as alternative options, but as the only safe options. Otherwise, all the discussion offers us is Russian roulette.
