Missing Out On WWI

Wendell Wagler in a letter to the editor of the Oregonian argues that promoting condoms is ineffective.

Shepherd Smith, president of the Institute for Youth Development in Washington, D.C., says the broad social marketing of condoms has not been shown to be effective. In fact, there is no instance in any country where broad-based marketing of condoms reduced HIV infection rates.

Apparently Wendell Wagler missed that whole period of history when the Comstock laws were in effect and the US military eventually started making condoms available to soldiers because so many of them were catching syphilis.

And sure enough the use of condoms and education brought about a very large decline in the numbers of US soldiers infected with these veneral diseases.

Here's a great paper on the Treatment of Syphilis in 1915. Sounds terrible, doesn't it Wendell?

Here's another quote from Scarleteen, a great resource for questions about teenage sexuality:

In the realm of sex "education" disinformation, we're currently in a very similar place to where we were back during the First World War. As part of a WWI "chastity campaign," “social hygienists" pushed the military to ban condom distribution among US troops, while all other countries involved in the war freely provided their soldiers with condoms. Guess whose troops had the highest rates of syphilis and gonorrhea of all those in Europe? Guess whose troops brought the disease back to their wives? Guess whose ideas -- that condoms weren't helpful and could be replaced by abstinence, and that marriage provided a safe haven from sexually transmitted disease -- were proven, without a shadow of a doubt, to be both fallacious and deadly, providing our young nation with its first serious nationwide wave of sexually transmitted diseases and infections? That's right, baby, Uncle Sam's.