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Conservative Attempt at Stopping Studies Dealing with Sex Narrowly Defeated
July 13, 2003
The U. S. House of Representatives on Thursday narrowly defeated a conservative effort to
forbid the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from giving grants to researchers
conducting four sexual research projects. Some of the what was to be axed, part of the
Healthy People 2010 initiative signed by President Clinton before leaving office in 2000,
included studies of older men and of San Francisco's Asian prostitutes and masseuses.
By a vote of 212-210, the House derailed an effort led by Rep. Pat Toomey, (R-PA), to
block the grants for next year, which are expected to total $1.4 million.
"Who thinks this stuff up?" Toomey said of the research projects he singled out
for their sexual subject matter. Toomey's amendment would have stricken four line items
from H.R. 2660, a resolution to fund the grants awarded by the National Institute of
Health. "These are not worthy ... of taxpayer funds," Toomey concluded.
Opponents called lawmakers' attempts to kill these projects "dangerous
precedent."
"We have no business making political judgments on those issues," said Rep.
David Obey, (D-WI).
"I strongly urge the Members to resist the temptation to select a few grants for
de-funding because they do not like the sound of them," added Rep. Ralph Regula
(R-OH) during House testimony. "It would set a dangerous precedent and put a chill on
medical research if we start to micromanage individual NIH grants."
Press reports earlier this year noted that studies submitted for NIH funding which
contained key words such as "gay", "sexual orientation",
"transsexual" or "transgendered" were routinely red-flagged and denied
consideration for funding.
"This was a radical conservative attempt at 'head-in-the-sand' politics - ignore the
problem and it doesn't exist any more," said Vanessa Edwards Foster of the National
Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC), in response to Toomey's amendment. Foster, chair of
NTAC, was part of the National LGBT Health Coalition lobbying effort (a consortium of
groups with concerned for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender health issues) in March
of this year to keep funding levels for Healthy People 2010 intact. "NTAC has been
involved in the [National] LGBT Health Coalition from its inception, and are committed to
seeing our community's health issues served, not ignored.
"With the AIDS outbreak in the early 80's, the Reagan administration chose to ignore
it because it was the "gay disease." Only now, some two decades later, are some
of those same conservatives like President Bush finally acknowledging the depth of the
AIDS problem with the pandemic in Africa."
"Thankfully logic prevailed," Foster added. "However, I wouldn't be
surprised to see political attempts to undercut NIH initiatives down the road."
The National Institutes of Health receive approximately 120,000 grant applications per
year, awarding funds to about one-third of them, according to Regula. The agency, a branch
of the Department of Health and Human Services, is the government's primary source of
biomedical research.
According to Toomey's office, the grants and their estimated cost next year are:
Mood arousal and sexual risk taking, $237,000, (by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana
University-Bloomington), Sexual habits of older men, $69,000 (at New England Research
Institute in Watertown, MA), Drug use and HIV-related behavior by San Francisco's Asian
prostitutes and masseuses, $641,000, (University of California-San Francisco Dept. of
Medicine), and American Indian and Alaskan Native lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered
and "two-spirited individuals," $500,000, (University of Washington-Seattle.)
"Conservatives continue showing utter disdain for the Queer Community, as well as
anyone else who's not CLU - Conservatives Like Us," Foster quipped. "That's
'compassionate conservatism' - compassion for conservatives only."
Toomey, a hard-line conservative, is challenging moderate GOP Sen. Arlen Specter for their
party's Senate nomination in Pennsylvania next year.
