She Pulled No Punches

Dr. Joycelyn Elders, until Friday the surgeon general of the United States, was always a political lightning rod, unafraid to speak her mind. When President Clinton appointed her, that was her virtue. Two years and a GOP landslide midterm election later, it was her undoing. The President sacked her after hearing of her suggestion that kids be taught about masturbation in school. That remark, combined with her previous strong words about drug legalization and her outspoken endorsement of homosexuals’ adoption of children, was just too much political freight for this Administration, or perhaps any, to carry.

It’s not that her outspoken stands lacked all logic. On the contrary, many thoughtful people advocate drug legalization; the controversial practice of homosexual adoption does have its supporters; and Elder’s comments on masturbation, made at a New York conference on AIDS, came in response to a question about whether masturbation might be a way of discouraging school-age children from much riskier forms of sexual activity.

But Elders had become too tempting a target for America’s political right, and in some ways perhaps too willing a one. The eldest of eight children, a child of poverty who never saw a physician before she entered college and a determined medical student who went on to become a respected pediatrician and then director of the Arkansas Department of Health, Dr. Elders was unwilling to abandon her uncompromising views, unwilling when she went to Washington to talk in the vague generalities of the diplomat.

She was also a woman of vision and caring, and if she violated Washington’s informal three-controversies-and-you’re-out rule, she was, like her distinguished predecessor, C. Everett Koop, willing to talk straight to the people about the real issues of health and medicine. And for this virtue, she deserves, as did the Reagan-appointed Koop, the gratitude of Americans.

We hope her successor, too, will speak out. Health issues are too important for top officials to be always pulling their punches.