In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. “Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV,” says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.
“Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex,” Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus. link
I don’t really have a lot of comment about this, susanbhu said the other day that people might not like living in a theocracy as much as some who currently want one might think.
I think she is right about that.
I guess the other big question has to do with women in the US – to what extent is their oppression sufficiently internalized?
Just how far are American women willing to go along to get along in the interest of pragmatism?
Don’t you get the feeling that these people just don’t like sex… or other people having better sex than they are.
are pathologically insane. Can we give these people back to Britain?
Gee, thanks Ductape. I was just starting to calm down and feel not so blue after my unhumorous response to that asswipe picture of bush. When as Michael Corleone would say, ‘you’re pulling me back in again’.
Dobson and the Family Reseach Council is scary. Dobson is the evil puppet master behind so much of this shit. After bush’s reelection he sorta came out of the closet so to speak and has gotten so much more vocal and pushing his personal freakazoid rendition of the bible/child rearing and sex …hopefully people will start seeing the true colors of these crazies. How did they get to be so sick-mindedly pathological(as booman said) on the whole subject of sex, just don’t get it.
I don’t see the democrats doing that much and all this is heading to some sort of civil movement that will be in the streets with demonstrations and protests and who knows what else. Cause we know they are never going to back down.
a local cable access channel a few years ago as some big-haired “ladies” expressed their outrage that middle school children were being taught in health class that getting pregnant during their teenage years is a bad idea because it would make it harder for them to complete their educations and be able to support themselves and their children later in life.
Outrage???? Well, it seems they were outraged that young girls would be given any reason for doing their best not to get pregnant too young other than “Jesus says that premarital sex is wrong.” Because, you see, if they are given a “secular humanist” reason for not getting pregnant, it interferes with parents’ right to teach their children their own personal religious beliefs.
Definitely a “wtf?” moment.
I think the more these nuts go public with nonsense like this the better, the extreme views tend to jar loose the mental cotton the middle of the road people have wrapped their common sense with. I think, hope at least, that many younger women will get angry about this, and heaven help the person who withholds a vaccine like this from an angry parent of daughters. I have heard more anger lately from women than in the previous few years, and this may push that anger into action.