Health-promotion experts and historians generally concur that the federal government’s response to HIV/AIDS during the 1980s and early 1990s was inadequate and constrained by moralism. President Ronald Reagan famously refused to publicly address the issue of AIDS until five years after the first reported cases of AIDS (and only after it was clear that HIV was spreading outside so-called “deviant” groups, such as homosexuals and injecting drug users). The U.S. surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, fought a losing battle against Reagan and Secretary of Education William J. Bennett to introduce pragmatic sex education classes into American high schools or even mention the word “condoms” in literature mailed to U.S. households. Congress was reluctant to fund gay-based organizations, such as New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis, to devise and deliver HIV prevention programs to their constituencies, despite evidence from countries such as Australia that peer-provided education was more successful and cost-effectiv...

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FOOTNOTES:

• [1] A. Lipsitz, P.D. Bishop, and C. Robinson, “Virginity Pledges: Who Takes Them and How Well Do They Work?,” presentation at the annual convention of the American Psychological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, May 31, 2003.