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Are we surprised that Secretary Thompson was booed?

Six months later at an international population-policy conference in Bangkok, the U.S. delegate advocated a birth control method that might have been endorsed by Pius XII’s College of Cardinals. There was U.S. State Department officer Elaine Jones telling delegates about her personal experience with the Billings birth control method—that’s the one that involves checking the viscosity of one’s own cervical mucus. An Iranian delegate who was also an OB-GYN physician responded that “natural family-planning methods have a very high failure rate.” The sources cited by the doctor/delegate were “all the textbooks that come from the United States.”

This would be funny were it not so deadly serious. It is most serious in the developing world, where contraception is a lifesaving measure because medical care is all but unavailable, and where high fertility rates drive high poverty rates. The Bush twins, Dick Cheney’s daughters, Laura Bush, and Lynne Cheney would never subject themselves to these primitive reproductive regimens. It’s unlikely that they would even sit with a group of friends and listen to such nonsense. Yet the president of the United States imposes it on women living in developing countries. It’s an easy way to please American fundamentalist Christians. All it requires is putting at risk the health of women who lack the financial resources to defend themselves and the health-care resources to meet their most basic needs.

WHEN SAMANTHA SMOOT read that Henry Lozano was sitting behind Laura Bush during the 2003 State of the Union speech, she experienced one of those “déjà vu all over again” moments so common to Texans since Bush moved on to Washington.

Smoot is executive director of the Texas Freedom Network, an advocacy group that monitors the policy initiatives of evangelical extremists. The TFN lobbied and opposed many of Bush’s faith-based programs in Austin, much as Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs do in Washington. Lozano is not from Texas, but the Teen Challenge drug-treatment program he ran in Southern California is the same program—along with the Roloff schools—that inspired Bush’s deregulation of faith-based organizations.

Smoot pulls a two-inch-thick Teen Challenge folder from a file cabinet in her small office. The largest single document in the folder is the licensure-inspection report the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse prepared in 1995.

The forty-nine-page report documents an almost complete lack of compliance with requirements that fall into ninety-nine categories, from counselor qualifications to staff training in CPR and first aid, on to electrical outlets and gas lines. Even clients looking for Bible-centered drug treatment can benefit from smoke alarms, emergency-exit lights in dorms, and functioning gas lines, all of which the state found lacking at Teen Challenge’s San Antonio campus. (Despite the name, Teen Challenge treats adults, not minors.)

It’s unlikely that Bush read the agency’s report, or its order to Teen Challenge to comply or surrender its license. However, he did respond. “Teen Challenge should view itself as a pioneer in how Texas approaches faith-based programs,” Bush told Marvin Olasky’s World Magazine. “Teen Challenge is going to exist. And licensing standards are going to be different than what they are today.”

He was right. Teen Challenge continues to operate today—unlicensed and without state supervision.

Two years into his presidency, Bush has failed to pass most of his compassionate-conservative agenda. The pared-down bill that finally made it through the Senate in early April 2003 had lost most of its religion and included only 15 percent of the tax incentives the White House wanted. Bush’s first faith-based program czar, John DiIulio, predicted the failure and returned to teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He blamed the political arm in the West Wing,