One Congressman’s Fight Against a Sexual ‘Conspiracy’

This year, an estimated 2.5 million American teen-agers will contract a sexually transmitted disease. Some will die; some will be made sterile. Others will be put at greater risk of developing other diseases, including cancer.

In an attempt to understand the precise scope and causes of this epidemic, the federal Department of Health and Human Services had hoped to survey the sexual behavior of 24,000 teen-agers. Participation was to have been contingent on parental consent.

But then the department’s secretary, Louis W. Sullivan, ordered the survey killed because, he said, it might “inadvertently” encourage casual sex among teen-agers. Sullivan’s decision, which overruled his own professional staff, came after the proposed study was attacked by conservative activists and lawmakers led by Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton). In 1989, Sullivan halted a similar survey of adult sexual practices after it, too, was attacked by Dannemeyer.

Why would the 62-year-old Orange County congressman use his influence to halt a study that health officials believe is critical to the well-being of American children? Because, he says, it--like the 1989 proposal--is the product of a conspiratorial “cell” of homosexuals or their fellow travelers operating within the Department of Health and Human Services.

This conspiracy, Dannemeyer told me this week, was undertaken as part of “an effort on the part of the homosexual network in America to develop some data that they then can use as justification for their claim that perversion is a normal sexual practice. This is their game.

“I believe there is a clear agenda on the part of the homosexual community to develop statistical data, which they then can twist to their own conclusions to justify perversion in American sexual practices.”

This agenda, Dannemeyer contends, is being advanced by a “cell in the HHS bureaucracy.”

What does he mean by a “cell?”

“There either is a group of people in HHS who are homosexual in their orientation, seeking to advance that agenda, or there is a group of people in HHS who seek to advance the cause of homosexuality--not homosexuals themselves, but (people who believe in) homosexuality as a civil right. I don’t know which.”

How, I wondered, could so small a group have obtained the influence Dannemeyer attributes to them?

“Look at their allies,” he said, “the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, the National Education Assn., People for the American Way, the Democratic Party, your profession--the media--television. These are all powerful elites in American society.

“Hardly a month goes by that your paper doesn’t have some story on Page 2 or in the View section dealing with the claimed positive side of homosexuality, seeking to influence the reading public into thinking this is OK.”

Dannemeyer also contends that the producers of “most” television programs “subtly insinuate themes into their programming of incest, homosexuality tolerance and promotion, promiscuous sex, excessive violence, advocacy of drugs and alcohol. It’s all part of the advancement of the liberal doctrine . . . that there are no fixed standards, no moral absolutes.

“When these elites have been infected with this philosophy that there is no God, of secular humanism and moral relativism, then you begin to get these elites tolerating homosexuality, which is a perversion and morally wrong.

“There’s money involved here, too. Homosexuals . . . have above-average incomes and they don’t raise children, so they don’t spend their money that way. They invest their money in politics. They contribute handsomely to campaigns of people who will advance their agenda.”

I asked Dannemeyer whether he really was saying that, even though doctors and other public health officials said they were interested in gathering sexual data to safeguard the health of teen-agers, they, in fact, were trying to do something else.

“That is precisely what I am saying,” he replied. “They will claim that this survey was to be conducted to advance the health of teen-agers. But, in fact, this agenda that I’ve described is what they’re after.”

Well, there you have it: Not just homophobia, but about as thorough a conspiracy theory as one gets. All it lacks is a space ship and some link to Lee Harvey Oswald. Maybe that will come.

Washington insiders say that the Bush Administration concedes Dannemeyer and his allies their influence over public-health issues because they are thought to speak for “traditional” and “pro-family” values.

The congressman and his friends do, of course, represent a persistent current in American life, although it is not the tradition of individual liberty and communal tolerance.

As to whether or not the values advanced by Dannemeyer and his own fellow travelers are “family values,” I can only say they are not the values of the family in which my mother and father raised me, nor of the one my wife and I made for ourselves. Nor, I suspect, are they the values of most of those who will read this column.

Whether they are the values of the family in the White House is a question only George Bush can answer.