There is a serious problem with the logic of this appointment.
The greatest factor contributing to the increasing incidence of AIDS is the view that human sexuality is not subject to moral choice. What sense does it make to appoint to a position of national leadership in the fight against AIDS an unabashed promoter of this morally debilitating view?
President Bush would have shown greater compassion for AIDS sufferers and their families by appointing someone who would challenge the prevailing lies about the disease, rather than someone who legitimizes them. The Bush administration should have looked for the most effective advocate of abstinence and self-control available, to use the position as a platform for the kind of moral education that is the only effective antidote against the irresponsible behavior intensifying this global tragedy.
The fact that Bush did not do so is a further confirmation that little or no understanding of moral principle is motivating personnel decisions in the Bush White House. This emerging pattern of appointments forces us to consider the real possibility that even Bush’s correct decisions, such as renewing the pro-life policy to deny American aid money to international organizations that support abortion, are themselves just part of an overall strategy of the politics of pandering. The Evertz appointment, like the Cellucci nomination, shows a readiness to sacrifice real compassion for the sake of currying favor. The president attempts to placate one group with one decision, and another group with a second decision, incompatible with the first, as if there's nothing at stake for the country that would require consistent thought about the moral principles to be understood and applied when dealing with these issues.
The president needs to realize that he cannot deal with policy questions of high moral importance as if the only thing at stake is the artful construction of a political coalition including – and neutralizing – citizens with fundamentally opposed moral principles. He needs instead to start making real choices, based on real moral principles, and take his political chances with the broad coalition of Americans who endorse moral principle, and who will support such a course. America needs a president whose highest priority is the good of the country, and who discerns that good as the result of reasoning from moral principle, not political calculation.
Evertz, publicly identified as a Catholic, lives with his “partner” in Wisconsin. The New York Times quotes Evertz as saying that “the president has said he is appointing people who are qualified and share his philosophy.” If the president is interested in philosophy, he might have paused before appointing a man who openly engages in a practice that has been declared mortally harmful to the soul by the very church to which that appointee professes adherence. But last I looked, philosophy requires both principles and logic, and if there is anything that the president and Evertz seem to “share,” it is the incoherence of their proposed approach to the AIDS crisis.
(Dr. Keyes recently founded and serves as chairman of the Declaration Foundation, a communications center for founding principles. To visit their website click here.)
Let’s take a closer look at the moral incoherence of the Evertz appointment, and the real human damage it will leave in its wake. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Evertz said that he was pleased to be the first “openly gay” appointee in a Republican administration. Now he will take control of an AIDS office which the Bush administration, under pressure from the radical homosexual lobby, has agreed to expand to levels not surpassed even by the Clinton administration.
We are assured by the president’s spokesman that “AIDS is on the president's mind, and it's something that he wants to combat.” But AIDS is a disease very much contributed to by the kind of behavior that Scott Evertz champions, promotes, and encourages. The agenda of open homosexual activism represents a view of human nature that denies the moral discipline and capacity that is a prerequisite for stemming the tide of AIDS. This is true, by the way, not only in the United States where AIDS is predominantly a homosexual disease. It is also true in Africa, where AIDS is overwhelmingly a heterosexual disease. The common factor in both places is that AIDS strikes hardest wherever a culture of sexual promiscuity makes its spread most possible.
Accordingly, to promote the culture of promiscuity – homosexual or heterosexual – among societies in which millions carry the AIDS virus is, in effect, to promote tragic death for enormous numbers of people.
The battle against AIDS requires, among other things, modification of the behavior that spreads the disease. But this behavior is validated by the implausible account that underlies the whole promotion of homosexuality – that whether human sexual behavior is rooted in our common nature or our genetic diversity, or in some other mechanism, we cannot finally control what we do. This view means that our response to the promptings of our passions, of our animal or physical nature, cannot include what used to be called sexual responsibility. The modification of our sexual behavior, on this view, is not within the grasp of human choice and discipline.
But, obviously, the doctrine that sexual self-control is impossible makes efforts to modify promiscuous behavior ridiculous. If sexual behavior is not obedient to moral resolution, then urging “safe sex” or abstinence are alike absurd, making no more sense than urging people to stop desiring food when they are hungry. But a theory that makes the notion of self-restraint absurd is indistinguishable from a justification of promiscuity. In fact, it is a justification for the cheerful toleration of the practice of any sexual behavior whatsoever that any one finds his passions inclining him toward. Adultery, incest, sex with children, sex with animals – arguing against any such sexual behavior becomes much more difficult once we decide that the notion of self-restraint is incoherent.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the spread of AIDS is caused, overwhelmingly, by the practice of promiscuous sex. AIDS is spread by behavior that is based on the notion that whenever we have sexual inclinations, we inevitably yield to them. The acts by which people all over the world are infecting other people with the AIDS virus are most effectively – and disastrously – rationalized by the view that we do not have the moral capacity to discipline our sexual actions and behavior in light of the prerequisites both of our social obligations and of our health. And it is utterly wrongheaded to put in charge of the fight against AIDS someone who champions the very misunderstanding of human nature and human sexuality that most contributes to the ravages of the disease.
Promoting to visible platforms of authority those who actually represent the undermining of our understanding of our moral capacity – an understanding which is required if we are to sustain moral responsibility – would be a grave error for any administration. It is particularly disappointing to see such decisions emerge from an administration that has encouraged the hope that it would be a champion of renewed concern about the moral condition and future of the country.
Is this the moral leadership Republicans want to present to America? Is this the moral leadership America wants to present to the world? It looks more like moral capitulation than moral leadership. One begins increasingly to suspect that the real energy of the Bush administration – whether in relations with China or with the domestic opponents of moral principle – will be to make sure that adversaries of American principle understand how little they have to fear from the compassionate conservatism of the new administration. The right name for such a policy is appeasement, and God help us if we forget where it leads.
