More great news from Bushland. Yet another sick, psychotic, amoral
a.shole is appointed.

        George M. Carter

**
http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/01/claude_allen_bu.html
January 06, 2005
CLAUDE ALLEN, BUSH'S NEW DOMESTIC POLICY CZAR

The appointment of Claude Allen as Bush's new chief domestic policy
advisor is another triumph for the Republican theocrats. A reactionary
black kapo, Allen is one of the darlings of the "family values"
ultra-conservative religious right led by James Dobson and his Focus
on the Family.

Recruited by Karl Rove as his watchdog on then-HHS secretary Tommy
Thompson (who had a much-exaggerated reputation as a "moderate"),
Allen--a visceral political homophobe-- was a former top aide Sen.
Jesse Helms, and in 1984 accused Helms' Democratic challenger,
then-Gov. James Hunt, of having links to "queers," "radical
feminists," socialists, and unions (Hunt was, in fact, a bible-quoting
right-wing Dem).

 As Health and Human Services Commissioner for very conservative
Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, Allen bent public health priorities to the
religious right's agenda and led a state-sponsored anti-safe sex
crusade that he had cooked up with the abstinence-only Institute for
Youth Development, whose mission is to teach children to fear rather
than understand sex, and says that condoms don't work to prevent AIDS.
Says Allen of condom use: "It's like telling your child, 'Don't use
the car,' but then leaving the keys in the Lamborghini and saying,
'But if you do, buckle up.'" In November 2001, Thompson toed the
Bush-Rove line when he put Allen in charge of supervising HHS' audit
of HIV-prevention spending: Allen led an HHS witch-hunt that
investigated all of the AIDS service organizations (like Gay Men's
Health Crisis) whose members staged a demonstration that disrupted
Tommy Thompson's speech to the international AIDS conference in
Barcelona, and purged several ASO's (like San Francisco's Stop Aids
Project) whose politics and science-based sex ed Allen didn't like.
Allen has regularly been on POZ magazine's list of the AIDS
community's top enemies (a tradition I began when I wrote a column on
the politics of AIDS for the mag.)

Also in his Virginia years, Allen was notorious for his opposition to
abortion--which he took to extreme lengths. As People for the American
Way noted when it and other liberal and civil rights groups (including
the NAACP) successfully opposed Bush's nomination of Allen for a
federal judgeship, "As Secretary of Virginia’s DHHS, Claude Allen also
built a long record of hostility to reproductive freedoms. In one
example, Allen worked to defeat legislation that provided health
insurance for children of the working poor, largely because the
program covered abortion services for rape and incest victims under
the age of eighteen. When the law was ultimately enacted, Allen was
faulted for not enrolling children quickly enough. He admitted
'abortion was a sticking point' delaying the enrollment of children.
In this episode, Allen proved himself to be so adamantly opposed to
reproductive rights that he found it preferable for poor children to
go without health coverage than to risk an underage sexual abuse
victim having access to state-funded abortion services."

Watch for the patronage system known as "faith-based initiatives" to
be considerably expanded on Allen's watch as domestic policy adviser.

Posted by Doug Ireland at 06:48 PM | Permalink
TrackBack