Did Michelle Obama, channeling Rev. Wright's racist paranoia, condemn south Chicago girls and young women to unnecessary and preventable STDs and cervical cancer?

To stem the political hemorrhaging it was causing, Sen. & Mrs. Barack Obama have withdrawn from membership at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. But to what extent did what they heard while they were members affect their activities outside the church over the last several years?

Recall these paranoid, racist statements of Rev. Wright, their former pastor, as he accused the United States government of developing and spreading HIV/AIDS specifically to commit genocide against the black population:

MODERATOR: In your sermon, you said the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. So I ask you: Do you honestly believe your statement and those words?

WRIGHT: Have you read Horowitz's book, "Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola," whoever wrote that question? Have you read "Medical Apartheid"? You've read it?

(UNKNOWN): Do you honestly believe that (OFF-MIKE)

WRIGHT: Oh, are you — is that one of the reporters?

MODERATOR: No questions...

(CROSSTALK)

WRIGHT: No questions from the floor. I read different things. As I said to my members, if you haven't read things, then you can't — based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.

In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the — one of the responses to what Saddam Hussein had in terms of biological warfare was a non-question, because all we had to do was check the sales records. We sold him those biological weapons that he was using against his own people.

So any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.

Now consider this segment from today's New York Times, in an article on the campaign's attempt to re-brand Michelle Obama (bold-face mine):

By 2001, Mrs. Obama, married for nine years and the mother of two daughters, had taken a job as vice president of community affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center. She soon discovered just how acrimonious those affairs were....

She also altered the hospital’s research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

"She’ll talk about the elephant in the room," said Susan Sher, her boss at the hospital, where Mrs. Obama is on leave from her more-than-$300,000-a-year job.

The New York Times reports this without much comment, buried near the bottom of its article, as if it's not particularly revealing or controversial. But it made my jaw drop. Has yours yet?

If not, consider more carefully: Here's the wife of the Great Unifier, the Great Conciliator, the Great Educator who's going to bring America to a post-racial future. She's supposedly a community activist working for the benefit of poor neighborhoods whose teenagers are disproportionately at risk for sexually transmitted diseases. She has an opportunity to reverse, through education, decades of racial distrust and to simultaneously protect her teen-aged female constituents against "cervical cancer and other diseases in females caused by certain types of genital human papillomavirus (HPV)[, a class of viruses] ... which are responsible for 70% of cervical cancers and 90% of genital warts." So Mrs. Obama strikes a mighty blow to promote ignorance, to prevent vacination, and to permit preventable STDs and cervical cancer.

Yes, the Tuskegee Syphillis Experiments were awful. Yes, there is a huge amount of racial mistrust and misinformation lingering because of them, as evidenced by Rev. Wright's pronouncements. But Tuskegee isn't the rule, it's the awful exception from an era in which we no longer live.

What kind of Luddite is this Princeton and Harvard educated lawyer and mother of two young girls? All such modern vaccination programs are voluntary — there's at least an opt-out provision, even when legislation has been proposed to add this vaccine to the mandatory list of vaccinations for public school attendance — and they require the genuinely well-informed consent of the participants. Surely someone like Michelle Obama and her husband (with his commitment to community education, in coordination with people like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn) could ensure that accurate information was provided in a meaningful format to promote informed choices. Indeed, it seems to me that she was uniquely positioned to strike a blow against bigotry, against ignorance, and in favor of education, science, and both racial and medical healing.

So: Why choose not to educate? Why not at least allow an opportunity for this scientific breakthrough to protect the health and the very lives of these at-risk girls and young women?

This is shameful behavior. I can't understand or explain it, other than as a function of the exact sort of racist paranoia that Rev. Wright has been preaching. It sounds as though Michelle Obama bought big-time into the very worst of Rev. Wright's screed — and that she actively practiced what he preached, to the detriment of the very people they were purportedly helping and protecting. I'm aghast.

-------------

UPDATE (Wed Jun 17 @ 6:00pm): Tom Maguire's reaction is very much like mine:

In a different and better world the community affairs director for a hospital would use her college education and neighborhood roots to educate and reassure the community that her hospital was not actually interested in recreating ghastly medical misadventures from the past. In this world, it looks like the Sister Grim is less interested in resolving these grievances and more interested in nursing them.

Tom also links this RAND news release from 2005 regarding the extent of conspiracy paranoia among blacks and its resulting deterrence of condom use and promotion of STDs.

Compare the more libertarian yet scientific and compassionate position of Dr. Ken Alexander of the Pediatrics Department of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine:

Dr. Alexander, a proponent of the HPV vaccine in young women, cautions lawmakers about proposed legislation that would require the HPV vaccine in the sixth grade. While stating that he does believe that teenaged girls should be immunized, he expresses his belief that this view is one that should not be forced upon the public but rather decided on the family level.

Regardless of whether you support mandatory vaccination (with opt-out rights) or merely more widely publicizing the vaccination option to families, it's hard to deny that here, Michelle Obama, who's dogmatically pro-choice on abortion rights, acted to take away choices from these girls and young women and their families.

The question in my mind is: Does she believe Rev. Wright's paranoid, racist fantasies? Or is she simply exploiting and continuing their currency among her constituents? Either is unacceptable, but the latter would put her on, or at least very near, a moral plane with the initiators of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments themselves.

-------------------------

UPDATE (Thu Jun 19 @ 5:15pm): When I picked up my middle two teens today, Sarah and Adam, I confirmed that both were familiar with the HPV vaccine, and that Sarah has been inoculated. I then told them the sad, sordid tale of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, a story they hadn't heard before, and that they reacted to with appropriate revulsion. But then I told them — as neutrally as I could — about what the NYT has reported on Michelle Obama's involvement in the HPV vaccination program at the University of Chicago hospital. My daughter's immediately reaction — unprompted by me — is that Michelle Obama's denial of medical prevention and treatment options to her hospital's patient population is as outrageous as the decisions made by the sponsors of the Tuskegee experiments. (Sarah will be a high school senior next year, and her politics in general much more closely match her mom's than mine: They were both Hillary Clinton supporters, for example.)

Barack Obama specifically pointed to Rev. Wright's comments about HIV/AIDS and Tuskegee when he disassociated himself from Rev. Wright, and he acknowledged that his pastor's views on those subjects were a legitimate topic of political interest. So what about his wife's views and actions on these subjects?

Ironically, the June 2 cover of TIME magazine is devoted to an article entitled "The Truth About Vaccines: Worried about autism, many parents are opting out of immunizations. How they're putting the rest of us at risk." (That story focused on childhood vaccines, not specifically on the HPV vaccine.) But another article touted on the cover is: "Will Michelle Obama hurt Barack in November?"

So when will the mainstream media put two and two together and realize that these questions are perhaps linked?

-------------------------

UPDATE (Thu Jun 20 @ 5:15pm): James Taranto'sBest of the Web column today includes some statistics on the dangers that the HPV vaccine can prevent, and also reads the facts reported in the NYT article as "suggest[ing] that girls in Chicago were denied potentially lifesaving vaccinations because Michelle Obama pandered to racial paranoia instead of standing up for the truth."