NOTORIOUS BIG MAN IN WASHINGTON:

The Bush Theocracy: Righteous homophobe Claude Allen brings his agenda to the White House (Doug Ireland, 1/14/05, LA Weekly)

President Bush’s appointment of his new chief domestic-policy adviser, Claude Allen — a notorious homophobe, a ferocious enemy of abortion and an opponent of safe-sex education who for years has been one of the AIDS community’s principal enemies — is a huge victory for the social reactionaries of the Christian right.

Allen, who was named to his new position in the White House last week, had previously been a top aide at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). He was placed there by Karl Rove as a watchdog on then–HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, who had an exaggerated reputation as a "moderate" and who wasn’t entirely trusted by Rove to carry out — by administrative order — the social agenda of the Christian right, a key part of Rove’s successful plan to mobilize millions of Christer voters for Bush’s re-election.

Known as Rove’s enforcer, Allen wielded a heavy, censorious and punitive hand at HHS. In November 2001, Thompson loyally toed the Rove-Bush line when he put Allen in charge of supervising HHS’s audit of HIV-prevention spending. Allen led an HHS witch-hunt that investigated all of the AIDS service organizations (ASOs) receiving any federal funding (like New York City’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis) whose staff members had disrupted Tommy Thompson’s speech to the 14th Annual International AIDS Conference in Barcelona; they were there to protest Bush’s lethal do-nothingism about the AIDS pandemic. These audits were designed to intimidate ASOs into abandoning AIDS advocacy. A number of ASOs, like San Francisco’s Stop AIDS Project and half a dozen other California AIDS-fighting groups, were ultimately purged from receiving U.S. funding by the Allen-led witch-hunt because Allen didn’t like their science-based sex-education programs. Allen ordered Advocates for Youth, the leading national coalition for safe-sex ed, audited half a dozen times.

Moreover, Allen was the driving force to replace science-based sex ed with the failed policy of teaching that only abstinence prevents AIDS. A black conservative and religious primitive, Allen helped bludgeon the Centers for Disease Control, which reports to HHS, into purging safe-sex materials from its Web sites and into adopting mandatory new rules requiring AIDS-fighting groups to teach that condoms don’t work in preventing the spread of AIDS, as I reported in the L.A. Weekly last year.

Sounds like a guy who gets things done.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 13, 2005 6:16 PM