Restraints on the Helping Hand

Re “A Misguided Anti-Vice Pledge,” editorial, March 20: I agree that ideology should not sway us from supporting what actually helps people. So why not also support faith-based initiatives here in the U.S.? They are staffed by honorable, self-sacrificing people who have proved to be more effective at lifting people out of the sinkhole of despair and substance abuse than any gray government agency.

However, your use of the secularists’ favorite slander, “proselytizer,” betrays your true feelings about such “pro bono” work done by Christians like Dr. Bill Frist and countless others. When accusing Christians of hurting the people of the Third World, remember that thousands of us today are in the Third World doing much more than just writing checks and articles from air-conditioned offices. Many have donated their lives and blood to such charity.

So why then were some of the finest charitable organizations in the world, like World Vision, excluded from most recommended donation lists that news organizations printed after the December tsunami? Because they were Christian, and some people care more about ideology than actually helping people. There are many suffering people in this world. I agree that this ridiculous culture war should not stop us from giving heartfelt assistance to those in need, but compromise requires multilateral thinking.

Michael Hsie MD

Chicago

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The Bush administration’s imposition of a new “gag rule,” requiring U.S. organizations to adopt a policy explicitly opposing prostitution in order to be eligible for federal grants for anti-AIDS work abroad, has broken new ground in its assault not only on reproductive choice but also on the 1st Amendment.

Egregious as it is, the original global gag rule, which prohibits U.S.-funded international family planning groups from even mentioning abortion, has, since it was first imposed in 1984, been applied only to organizations based abroad. In a letter last September, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel reversed the department’s own recently stated opinion that analogous restrictions pertaining to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act could be applied only to foreign-based organizations. The legal counsel decided, in effect, that requiring American healthcare organizations to adopt particular political postures did not violate their freedom of speech after all. The result of that ruling is the pernicious “anti-vice pledge” that you so properly denounce.

The Bush administration will stop at nothing to advance its fundamentalist agenda, even at the cost of women’s deaths from unsafe abortion, impeding the fight against HIV/AIDS, and now the erosion of Americans’ constitutional rights.

Carmen Barroso

West. Hemisphere Regional

Director, International

Planned Parenthood

Federation, New York