from Talk to Action

Talk to Action's dogemperor has documented extensively, and Ethics Daily concurs, that the Religious Right has an increasingly dangerous tendency to confuse medical mortality and morbidity with divine punishment for what they believe to be sexual impurity -- a moral blindness evident in their response to the cervical cancer vaccine that, when administered to girls under age 16, promises to confer near total immunity in later life. But the cancer in question is cervical cancer, its precursor is Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), and HPV is contracted through having ... uh ... sex.

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State reported this summer that a spokeswoman for the Family Research Council said young women should have to deal with the consequences of the rapidly spreading sexually transmitted disease rather then rely on a new vaccine.

"Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," the FRC's Bridget Maher reportedly told New Scientist. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex."

Nick at morons.org summed up the "protection is permission" mindset: "This is probably a legitimate concern -- I know that when I got a tetanus vaccine, the first thing I wanted to do was to run out and play on rusty manure-spreading farm equipment in an effort to get as many puncture wounds as possible."

"I personally object to vaccinating children when they don't need vaccinations, particularly against a disease that is one hundred per cent preventable with proper sexual behavior," Leslee J. Unruh, the founder and president of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, said. "Premarital sex is dangerous, even deadly. Let's not encourage it by vaccinating ten-year-olds so they think they're safe."

Unruh, the "pro-life" mouthpiece of record in South Dakota, might be getting her comprehensive knowledge of both child psychology and gynecological epidemiology from her husband Alan, the chiropractor who served as an "expert" consultant to the South Dakota Task Force on Abortion, because her opinion on the sexual morality of cervical cancer sufferers agrees with that of another medical expert, family practitioner and Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. In addition to believing that abortion should be illegal and that abortion-providing doctors deserve the death penalty, in 2004 Senator Coburn testified, "Studies have indicated for years that promiscuity was associated with cervical cancer."

There's an expert medical opinion for you: sluts get cancer. I wonder whether Dr. Coburn diagnosed his patients by watching prerecorded videos, as Dr. Bill Frist so notoriously did with Terri Schiavo, or whether he actually required them to come in for colposcopy and a biopsy. As Coburn himself said about Congress (even before he developed his strange obsession with teenage lesbianism), "There are not many normal people up here" '