Been Caught Stealin'

Claude Allen, who was a top Bush aide at the Department of Health and Human Service before becoming BUsh's domestic policy advisor stepped down in February after being caught committing 25 counts of fraud against Target and Hecht's stores. [365gay.com]

Allen is a Christian, and as part of his faith, he has used his position in the government to harass and audit AIDS Service Organizations that target gay men and try to improve their health, to harass and audit programs that teach young adults how to prevent pregnancy, STDs, and abortions, and has used the CDC to promote the myth that condoms are not effective against HIV. He as also a press aide to Jesse Helms in the 1980s.

This high-ranking Christian was the conduit for the Religious Right in HHS. Esther Kaplan's book, "With God on Thier Side: George Bush and the Religious Right," outlines how Allen is used by anti-gay and anti-choice organizations to fullfill their goal of eliminating funding for AIDS organizations, and funnelling that money to abstinence-only until marriage programs. And besides being a Christian, he's also a theif.

If you'd like to read more about this gay-bashing Christian theif, I've reposted an article on him below.

From Eschaton:

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 ("Condom Wars," June 25–July 1). When a federal judge found that a federally funded Louisiana abstinence program "illegally handed out Bibles, staged anti-abortion prayer rallies outside women’s clinics and had students perform Bible-based skits," Allen refused to have the program audited, while continuing his repeated audit persecutions of effective AIDS-fighting groups teaching condom use.

Allen also enforced his abstinence-only line when he was commissioner of Health and Human Services for Virginia under right-wing GOP Governor Jim Gilmore. There, too, he bent public health priorities to the religious right’s agenda, and led a state-sponsored anti–safe sex crusade that he cooked up with a kooky abstinence-only Christer outfit called the Institute for Youth Development, which also claims that condoms don’t work to prevent AIDS and teaches children to fear, rather than understand, sex. As Allen said then 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.’"

Allen’s history as a gay-baiter goes back to his days as a top aide to the notorious homophobe Senator Jesse Helms. In 1984, Allen accused Helms’ Democratic challenger, then-Governor James Hunt, of having links to "queers," "radical feminists," socialists and unions (Hunt was, in fact, a Bible-quoting right-wing Dem.) And Allen forged his odious reputation as a black capo for the racist right when he continued working for Helms despite the senator’s militant opposition to making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.

Notorious for his anti-abortion stance, at HHS Allen helped use its regulatory powers to turn Title 10 of the Public Services Act — which Bush père had championed — away from family planning and the promotion of condom use and into an abstinence-only program. In his Virginia years, Allen’s Christian-right extremism led him to endanger the health of children. Then 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 18. "When the law was ultimately enacted, Allen was faulted for not enrolling children quickly enough, and admitted that ‘abortion was the sticking point’ delaying the enrollment of children," as People for the American Way (and civil rights groups like the NAACP) pointed out last fall when they successfully opposed Bush’s nomination of Allen for a federal judgeship. "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."