With God On Their Side: Author Esther Kaplan Interviewed
George W. Bush And The Christian Right
(the subtitle of the newer, paperback edition)

Interviewed by Claudette Vaughan

Abolitionist: With God On Their Side is a searing document of a remarkable level of access that the Christian Right lobby has at all levels of the Bush administration, and it’s impact on governance. How did you come about to write it?

Esther Kaplan: I was doing a bunch of reporting on HIV/AIDS issues back in the very early years of the Bush administration and I started going down to Washington to attend the President’s AIDS advisory meetings. I had been reporting on AIDS for many years so I’ve seen what these advisory bodies looked like under Bill Clinton for example.

I walked into this room and instead of scientists and social service providers or those that were involved with the disease on the front lines instead it was evangelical inspirational speakers and young people who lectured on being virgins and religious right activists who were trying to debunk the idea that condoms can prevent HIV. I was really, really stunned to walk into this room and see this. There were Bush-appointed advisors who said when I was interviewing them that they didn’t know anything about HIV or AIDS. I then began to wonder how often this was occurring throughout the bowels of the federal government. And at this time, 2002, all people were talking about in this country was whether we were going to go to war on Iraq and all eyes were focused on the 9/11 attacks and the aftermath. No one was really paying attention to what Bush was doing on domestic policy, which is where whole areas of public health were being turned over to religious ideologues. Scientists were being shunted to the sidelines.

Abolitionist: Two of the most startling facts about your book was a. the broad takeover by the evangelicals was shocking in its outreach and b. the deliberate attempt to cover up facts such as excluding high risk categories for much of the data that is aimed at people of colour, intravenous drug users, homosexuals and sex workers. What was your reaction to your own findings and second, how have they been able to get away with it for so long?

Esther Kaplan: It’s been amazing that they have been able to get away with it. One of the things you’ve referred to is the attacks on research grants. Research like where is HIV exploding? What communities is it exploding in and why? All of the public health researchers out there who have gotten the brunt of this, who have been committed to their work, who have been jeopardized by speaking out, they are being told by people within the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of public health research in the world, not to even use language like “gay”, “men who have sex with men”, “sex worker” or “drug user”. They are supposed to use value-laden words such as “drug addict” or not admit at all that they are working with these stigmatized communities. They are supposed to use euphemistic terms such as “urban populations” and so on.

I interviewed half a dozen or more of these researchers and none of them would let me use their names. They were all completely intimidated and felt like if they were to be public critics of the Bush administration that their institutions being university-based would get punitively de-funded. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that that’s exactly what the Administration was doing. So the AIDS service provider organisations that were most openly critical of the Administration ended up getting financial audits and audits to check if their prevention materials violated federal obscenity regulations. Some organisations had to spend years defending themselves from these federal audits. The fear on the part of researchers was based on the kind of hardball, punitive track record that the Administration had established. People have just been intimidated from speaking out.

Abolitionist: What have the pro-gay left wing lobby groups said to you about being frozen out of funding and what do you think is going on with all of this hatred of gay people in the United States at this point in time?

Esther Kaplan: It is amazing. There’s a scene I describe in the book even though I wasn’t there I interviewed several people who attended this event and even when they were recounting it to me they were blown away that the debate in the federal government had descended to this level. This was an event that was sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control, which is the body in the US government that is responsible for disease prevention, and it was about rethinking paradigms for HIV prevention. These long-time AIDS policy types and service providers and advocates who have been sitting in on meetings in Washington, DC, for 10 or 20 years, find themselves in the room with right-wing Christian lobby groups with names like “Concerned Women for America” “Focus On The Family” and “The Family Research Council” and so forth who are openly saying that the cure for HIV is to cure homosexuality. These people saying this are openly walking up to gay people in attendance and are disparaging them for their sexuality and are using slurs against them because of their sexuality. You can’t imagine that in an official federal government health conference that this kind of thing would go on and it did. There’s been a license, and it comes from the very top, to openly vent hatreds and phobias especially towards gay people but to all those other stigmatized communities affected by AIDS, whether it’s sex workers or drug users. The Christian Right seems to somehow believe that it’s sound public policy to just wish these communities out of existence. I think a lot of it is that the experts are being exiled and the few who remain are out-numbered. Ignorance is ruling the roost.

Abolitionist: Right from the advent of the epidemic of AIDS back in the 80’s condoms have played the most crucial role as the front line form of defence in combating the HIV infection from spreading yet these abstinence-only Christian Right activists have condemned the condom. Where is the uproar from the Left? Has anybody addressed the Christian Right and their sheer callousness and lack of compassion promoted with their “Purity First” programs in banning gays and so-called other “undesirables” in this race to form their New World Order?

Esther Kaplan: I think their sell on condoms is extremely explicit. It’s been going on for years, but it’s finally gotten Administration endorsement since the arrival of George W. Bush and that’s really changed the dynamic. There’s a guy named Joe McIlhaney and he runs an institute in Texas, so he goes way back with George W. Bush from his days as governor in Texas, called “The Medical Institute For Sexual Health”. This sounds like a neutral organisation but the entire purpose of this organisation has been to use out-of-context data, to use poorly conducted or anecdotal studies to produce seemingly official-looking evidence that condoms do not prevent HIV infection. This guy now holds multiple positions in the Administration. He’s an advisor to the Centers for Disease Control itself. He’s an advisor on the Administration’s HIV/AIDS policy. He’s received federal grants for public health from the Administration. We’re going from someone being a marginal outlier – someone that was completely considered a fraud--to now having been scooped inside the government and playing a profound role in shaping federal policy. One of the most blatant attacks we’ve see on condoms dates back to when a guy named Tom Coburn, who was a congressman at the time, decided to push for this massive NIH study into the effectiveness of condoms. He believed if there was a big metastudy then it would prove condoms aren’t effective at stopping HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases. Well the NIH study in fact proved that condoms are extremely effective. They did find in the case of one sexually transmitted disease, Human papillo mavirus (HPV), that there wasn’t very good evidence either way whether condoms could prevent the spread of infection or not. There just hadn’t been enough study. Coburn and McIlhaney and their allies at Focus on the Family pounced on this and used this in abstinence education pamphlets across the nation and internationally to claim that condoms do not prevent HPV and you can’t depend on condoms and abstinence is the only answer. Recently a vaccine was approved for HPV and people on the Christian Right opposed wide distribution of the vaccine. Why? Because HPV had become their number one ideological tool in attacking condoms. This is an example where you really see that their interest is not public health, it’s morality. And when their morality and public health clash, public health loses and their “morality” wins.

It’s the same with the issue of abstinence-only HIV prevention. To me there is nothing more callous and disregarding of human life than to go into countries in southern Africa with HIV infection rates as high as 25%, in some cases even higher, where marriage itself is a HIV infection risk because there are so many negative women married to positive men, and telling people that abstinence before marriage and fidelity in marriage will protect them from HIV. Because of the pressure of the Christian Right that’s what this government is now doing to the tune of more than a billion dollars. It’s a scandal and we are beginning to see troubling data from Uganda where these abstinence-only programs are flourishing. Uganda is the only country in southern Africa that actually turned around its HIV infection rates – they were climbing until the mid-1990s and they actually reversed that by 2001. But after a few years of US-funded abstinence-only programs dominating the approach to prevention there, the Health Minister announced in May that HIV infection rates are now climbing again. We are getting to the point where you can measure in the tens of thousands lives that are going to be lost because of these policies. Again, for the advocates of abstinence-only, morality is their chief concern. They can look these health consequences in the face and they don’t blink.

Abolitionist: So, to the Christian Right, it’s better to die and not wear a condom than to wear one and live?

Esther Kaplan: Yeah.

Abolitionist: Has anybody questioned the sanity of the Christian Rights“ Pledge Your Virginity to God” programs?

Esther Kaplan: There’s beginning to be a lot more public debate about this in the United States. It will be interesting to see what happens at the polls in November and to what extent there’s beginning to be a clash around this. But we have a problem in this country where we have this wonderful value of freedom of religion that has served the United States very well but on the other hand when a religious movement such as the conservative evangelical movement in this country becomes a political force we don’t have the tools to know how to oppose their political agenda without feeling that we are religion-bashing. Everyone is dealing with this movement with kid gloves, there’s a feeling that you cannot criticize their agenda without attacking their religion. This is something that people will have to get over. We have to respect whatever religious beliefs people privately hold but when they try to bring these beliefs into public policy it’s all fair game. At that point we have to look at the consequences and we have to be honest and we have to be ready to do battle on the policy front.

Abolitionist: How was a strict medical issue turned around? In your book you mentioned court stripping and stacking the courts in favour of their own people. What else?

Esther Kaplan: If you look at who has been on the streets in the United States in the last several years, it’s not the Christian Right. It’s the anti-war movement, the anti-globalization movement, immigrants fighting for their rights. These are the people who are turning out in the hundreds of thousands. What the Christian Right have been doing, and it’s taken a generation for them to accomplish, they have moved in and looked at institutional levers of power. They have brought their own activists into the local then the State Republican Party committees to the point that they in effect have the ability to decide who can run for office in the Republican Party. They have taken over academic institutions within the evangelical movement so that seminaries are only producing people who are conservative both politically and theologically. They have created bodies within the US Congress that have no parallels on any other issue. In the Senate and in the House there’s something called the “Values Action Team” where every single week elected representatives who have the right values credentials sit down with representative of all the top Christian Right groups and they plan policies: We’ll introduce this legislation; you promote it on your network of media outlets that reaches millions of your followers; you hold the press conferences; you twist the arms. It’s an incredibly sophisticated joint inside-outside strategy that’s been perfected over many years and really has reached its apotheosis at this time when we have one-party rule in Washington.

Abolitionist: What do you think Karl Rove’s role is in all of this?

Esther Kaplan: I don’t know if this has made it to Australia but a guy named David Kuo, who was once fairly high up in an initiative that George Bush created called “The Faith Based and Community Initiative.” He has just written a book in which he said that Rove and people in Rove’s political office spoke very dismissively and disparagingly, even mockingly at times, of the Christian Right. It’s consistent with my sense of what’s going on. Karl Rove himself is not a religious man. He’s someone that figured out early in his career and early in his “King-maker” effort to turn George Bush into the successful politician that he is, that the Christian Right was a political force to be reckoned with. The Democrat Party for years used to have an incredible voter turnout operation in the Labor Unions which has since fallen apart with the decimation of the U.S. Labor movement. The Republican party never had the same boots-on-the-ground voter-turnout operation, but they found that they could cultivate this by using the conservative Christian media, television and radio, by using this huge network of evangelical mega-churches, that they could cultivate an impressive get-out-the-vote operation among a constituency that historically did not always vote in very high numbers--if they were very strong on certain hot button issues. So in the lead up to elections the Administration is always going to come out strong on something whether it’s opposing gay marriages or opposing abortion or expanding the faith-based initiative. Karl Rove respects the evangelical movement for its political power. He’s certainly not someone who shares their viewpoint, who shares their perspective. George Bush himself does share many of their values, perspectives and world-views. But between Rove and the Christian Right it’s a cynical relationship--however it’s a relationship of mutual respect. They can each give each other what each other wants.

Abolitionist: What is the way forward? How does one go up against those quote, “ groups that do no AIDS work; having nothing to offer the prevention of AIDS debate except ideological positions and people who have no background in HIV”?

Esther Kaplan: I hope that the more their effect on public policy comes to light the more we are going to begin to see a backlash against it. That is an optimist statement. There isn’t tremendous evidence of that yet. What we tend to see is its opposite. The Democratic Party has been made so nervous by this political constituency that they are now trying to reframe their positions on abortion rights and promote pro-life Democrats and sell themselves as a party that can embrace people who are against abortion rights. The minority leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, has even created a special working group to coach members of Congress on how to inject “Faith” language into their public statements. So what we are seeing at the moment is a capitulation to the power of this social movement, not any interest in creating a counter-force. Unfortunately, a lot of the influence they have has been institutionalized. There have been multi-billion dollar programs created to accommodate them. It will be very hard to end the Faith-based initiative because once you have organisations and constituencies dependent on a funding stream it becomes very unpopular for a member of Congress to vote to end that funding stream. We have a lot that’s been written into law including restrictions on abortion rights and more. It’s going to take a lot to turn back their influence and unfortunately what we are seeing right now, whether it’s Republicans or Democrats, there’s very little willingness or backbone to confront these folks.

I would hate for us to have to watch hundreds of thousands of new infections in Africa begin to develop before we pull back from these genocidally ignorant policies that America is promoting around the world. I think the one good thing is that they were avoiding media scrutiny for a very long time and now that’s not true. A number of books have come out since my book and there are a number more coming out. A few reporters are now starting to look at this quite seriously at some of the major dailies. What I’m hoping is the more their influence is brought to light the more we will begin to see, average people protesting. Scientists are already mobilized because the basic project of scientific research is profoundly under attack, advocates for women’s reproductive rights, sector by sector, people are beginning to really put up a fight. We’ll see whether or not it adds up to anything.

Abolitionist: We have seen it with Katrina; we’ve seen it with the Christian Right and their attitude towards gay people in the 70’s. I have to ask you why it’s people of colour and gays targeted again for death. The strategy changes but the result is still fatal. Is anybody putting those connections together?

Esther Kaplan: It’s really worrisome. Unfortunately evangelism as a religious movement is growing in Africa and this is part of why the Christian Right has been so interested in getting federal grants to head over there and teach the abstinence-only method – it gives them a foothold for evangelizing. There are local members of the clergy in Africa who are embracing this enthusiastically. It’s really troubling. To have the most reactionary religious leaders on the continent receive money, as well as the endorsement and backing from the US government, to spread their messages. Martin Ssempa, a local minister in Uganda who conducts public condom burnings, is a US grant recipient. You can imagine the legitimacy it gives people on a local level to say that they have received US government money for their programs. So the impact is incredibly toxic and there does exist a callousness regarding how many lives will be lost. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that somewhere buried under there, there exists some racism. Just a failure to identify human-to-human with the breadth of the AIDS tragedy in Africa.