The Week

Bill Clinton’s vacation is over, and we’re only sorry it couldn’t be made retroactive to January.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Bill Clinton’s nominee for Surgeon General, has seen her high-octane rhetoric fuel enough controversy for a dozen confirmation hearings. But since one man’s provocation is another’s plain-speaking, Dr. Elders deserves to be judged by the value of her prescriptions. In the midst of an epidemic of teen pregnancies, with all the consequences in terms of welfare payments, disease, and chaotic lives, Dr. Elders proposes evangelizing for condoms as the solution. The argument is familiar, and superficially plausible: teenagers are having sex, condoms are (fairly) effective, so . . . The argument ignores the facts of real life: condoms break; teenagers in the heat of passion misuse or forget them; most important, condom programs imply approval of, and thus encourage, teen sexual activity. The proof is in Dr. Elders’s own bailiwick. Before she took over as director of the Arkansas Department of Health, the state’s high teen-pregnancy rate had dropped 10 per cent. After she instituted school-based clinics, the rate rose by 17 per cent. Some solution. Joycelyn Elders is not the wrong woman for Surgeon General because she’s feisty, she’s the wrong woman because she’s wrong.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Bill Clinton’s vacation is over, and we’re only sorry it couldn’t be made retroactive to January.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Bill Clinton’s nominee for Surgeon General, has seen her high-octane rhetoric fuel enough controversy for a dozen confirmation hearings. But since one man’s provocation is another’s plain-speaking, Dr. Elders deserves to be judged by the value of her prescriptions. In the midst of an epidemic of teen pregnancies, with all the consequences in terms of welfare payments, disease, and chaotic lives, Dr. Elders proposes evangelizing for condoms as the solution. The argument is familiar, and superficially plausible: teenagers are having sex, condoms are (fairly) effective, so . . . The argument ignores the facts of real life: condoms break; teenagers in the heat of passion misuse or forget them; most important, condom programs imply approval of, and thus encourage, teen sexual activity. The proof is in Dr. Elders’s own bailiwick. Before she took over as director of the Arkansas Department of Health, the state’s high teen-pregnancy rate had dropped 10 per cent. After she instituted school-based clinics, the rate rose by 17 per cent. Some solution. Joycelyn Elders is not the wrong woman for Surgeon General because she’s feisty, she’s the wrong woman because she’s wrong.