[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 106 (Friday, July 31, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H6872-H6873]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               ONGOING RAMIFICATIONS OF SEXUAL REVOLUTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise to draw the attention of 
my colleagues and the American people to a very important article that 
was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the July 
30, 1998 issue, and in particular as well an accompanying editorial 
authored by Drs. Cohen and Fauci of the National Institutes of Health. 
This article is entitled ``Sexual Transmission of HIV-1, Variant 
Resistance to Multiple Reverse Transcriptase and Protease Inhibitors'' 
authored by Dr. Hecht as well as many others.
  Now, it may seem a little bit unusual for a Member of Congress to be 
rising talking about something like this article and this accompanying 
editorial, but let me just say from the outset that as many of my 
colleagues know, I am a physician and as well I did part of my training 
in San Francisco in the early 1980s at a time when the AIDS epidemic 
was just emerging as a critical national health problem. Additionally, 
after finishing my training and ultimately going into private practice 
in Florida, I had the opportunity to take care for many years of many 
AIDS patients. And so this has always been an area of tremendous 
interest for me, particularly as it relates to government spending, 
public health, and a lot of social phenomena that has occurred in this 
country over the last 30 years, in particular as it relates to the 
sexual revolution.
  There were many features of the sexual revolution that occurred in 
the United States. Having only 5 minutes, I would not be able to dwell 
on all of them, but I would like to touch on several of the critical 
features of the sexual revolution, one of which is that premarital sex 
and having sex with multiple partners, contrary to centuries-long 
taboos, was now considered socially okay, and indeed as well that 
homosexual sex and sex with multiple partners was as well considered 
okay, if it involved two consenting adults.
  As we are beginning to see in this country today, there are indeed 
some significant societal impacts of this revolution, particularly in 
the form of the explosion of sexually transmitted diseases and its 
consequences. For example, 20 percent of all Cesarean sections done in 
the U.S. today are done because of the presence of a sexually 
transmitted disease in the mother. This has significant public health 
impact. It has a significant cost impact for our government-run health 
care, programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and as well the sexual 
revolution in the homosexual community which led to the AIDS epidemic 
ultimately spilling over into the heterosexual community.

  What is very important about this article, I want to draw to Members' 
attention, is that we have seen in recent years the good development of 
the availability of multiple drugs for the treatment of AIDS. Unlike 
when I first started practicing where the people would develop AIDS and 
they would die very quickly, we now have this very, very good 
armamentarium of drugs that allow people to live for years and the 
death rate from AIDS has dropped off significantly.
  There has been in recent years a very, very ominous development of 
resistance within patients with AIDS to

[[Page H6873]]

multiple different drugs that we are now using.
  The important feature of this article is that what they have 
documented in this article is there was a gentleman who had developed 
AIDS in 1990 and had been on multiple drugs over 8 years and had 
developed a variant of the AIDS virus that was resistant to those 
drugs. That gentleman had homosexual relations with a gentleman, passed 
AIDS to that gentleman, and this occurred in San Francisco, and the 
gentleman who acquired AIDS acquired a form of AIDS that was now 
resistant to all of the drugs that his partner had been resistant to.
  The accompanying editorial reads, ``Transmission of Multiresistant 
Human Immuno Deficiency Virus, the Wake-up Call,'' a very appropriate 
title for this editorial.
  This is, I would like to say, a very, very serious public health 
development that we are now seeing, the transmission of multidrug 
resistance to AIDS.
  Unfortunately, the gentleman in this editorial did not address the 
underlying problem, and this is really the focus of what I want to get 
at. This disease, as well as the transmission of other sexually 
transmitted diseases, is a behaviorally transmitted disease and we are 
not addressing that issue as a public health issue.
  Indeed, the authors of this editorial make a glancing comment about 
how, again, we need more sex education.
  Until we as a nation truly begin to lift up abstinence and point out 
how many of these so-called safe sex regimens are not truly safe, we 
are never going to be able to deal with this problem.
  I would like to draw the Speaker's attention and Members' attention 
to a very important article that appeared in the Atlanta Journal 
Constitution just yesterday, and the Surgeon General, David Satcher, 
spoke at a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 
where he again reiterated the mantra of the Clinton administration's 
approach to this problem that we need more sex education and more use 
of condoms, and in an interview afterwards with the President of the 
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, III, he 
had this very important statement to make, and it is this: The only way 
is abstinence. Sex should not be something that we just casually engage 
in and take lightly.
  I am very, very pleased that Mr. King made this statement, 
particularly in light of the fact that while blacks only make up 13 
percent of the U.S. population, they are accounting for 57 percent of 
the new cases of AIDS. It is time for America to wake up and say that 
the sexual revolution was a fraud; that the old way was the better way.
  I am very disappointed with Drs. Fauci and Cohen that they do not 
tackle this issue head on but instead make comments about how we need 
to encourage safe sex more. This is a fraud and a lie.
  We are going to begin to see in this country the emergence of 
multidrug resistant AIDS and we are going to have to invest even more 
money in developing new drugs, and until we recognize the fact that 
this is a behavioral problem and that safe sex is not the way to go but 
abstinence is the way to go, we will never deal with the problem.

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