It's also nice to know that his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, is making the world safer for drug users who hide stashes in drug treatment centers.

I'm just getting whiplash trying to figure out which version of the Bush “family values” I'm supposed to embrace.

President Bush says a person's right to privacy shouldn't extend to them getting all available information on how to prevent exposure to HIV — at least not from federal government Web sites — if that information includes the word condom.

Sex police

His latest effort at championing “family values” is to encourage abstinence-only messages on government-funded Web sites and to silence anything that implies that there's such a thing as safe, or at least safer, sex.

Recently, information on the effectiveness of condom use in preventing HIV transmission was pulled from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Web site. The Bush administration says it's trying to make sure tax dollars are properly spent.

One of the erased sections: “Programs that Work.” Guess we don't need to know about them.

The Centers for Disease Control wasn't the only target.

The Department of Health and Human Services is conducting a “management review” of its spending on AIDs efforts. It's scrutinizing agencies that engage in prevention, treatment and research. At least eight AIDS programs are being investigated by the department's inspector general to see if their information is too sexually explicit or promotes sexual activity.

Let's put a brown bag over the whole anti-AIDs effort. Let's change all our research and marketing communications to one message: “Don't have sex. Don't have sex. Don't have sex.” That'll convince our youth, who are most at risk. That'll save lives.

Rocky roads

Meanwhile, in Florida, the state that handed President Bush the presidency, the executive and judicial branches are busy upholding privacy rights of drug users at treatment centers.

Interestingly, the test case is Noelle Bush, Gov. Jeb Bush's 25-year-old daughter and a niece of the president.

She has been staying recently at the Center for Drug-Free Living in Orlando after being caught trying to illegally purchase the tranquilizer Xanax.

On Sept. 9, police investigated a report that center employees had found crack cocaine in Ms. Bush's shoe. The worker who found the 0.2-gram rock was ordered by supervisors to not cooperate. She tore up her written statement to police and threw it into a wastebasket in front of an investigator.

Florida's attorney general subpoenaed four workers but to no avail. No charges were filed against the governor's daughter or her supplier.

On Monday a circuit judge ruled that federal law protects patients' privacy at drug treatment centers, outweighing police interests in criminal investigations.

“Our drug-court system is based on the fact that the road to recovery is a rocky one,” Gov. Bush said, no pun intended.

What these two stories tell me is that the Bush family has two sets of family values: one that it claims to uphold and seeks to extend to the rest of the country, and another that it actually lives by but would rather not suffer the consequences for.

I don't judge the Bushes for their offsprings' youthful indiscretions or crimes. But I resent the Bush family's moralistic preaching when it becomes national policy.

E-mail damos@enquirer.com or call 768-8395.

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