There’s an editorial by Bill Maher up on Salon calling out Christian groups for their hypocrisy involving the HPV vaccine that’s worth taking a look at (via Feministe).
Now for the bad news: Not everyone is pleased with this vaccine. That prevents cancer. Christian parent groups and churches nationwide are fighting it. Bridget Maher — no relation, and none planned — of the Family Research Council says giving girls the vaccine is bad, because the girls “may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.”
Which is really a stretch. People don’t get the vaccine for typhoid and say, “Great, now I can drink the sewer water in Bombay.” It’s like saying if you give a kid a tetanus shot she’ll want to jab rusty nails in her feet. It’s like being against a cure for blindness because it’ll encourage masturbation. It’s like being for salmonella poisoning in peanut butter because it’ll discourage weirdos from spreading it on their ass and calling the dog.
Not that the religious wackjobs are listening. In their world, sexually active females who have not been properly paid for with gold are to be punished for having sex. We hear it so much we’re all about numb to it. “If you don’t want to pay the price [pregnancy], don’t play the game [have sex]“. For people who think pregnancy is a punishment for having sex, is it any wonder that they would go apeshit crazy about a vaccine that would protect a woman from a deadly disease? I don’t think so.
But let’s be frank: These Christian groups aren’t just against the HPV shot; they’re against family planning and condoms and morning after pills — they want to make sure sex is as dangerous as possible, so that kids know, if they sleep around and get an STD, that’s God teaching them a lesson. And the lesson is, you should never have tried out for “American Idol” in the first place.
Maher tries to be funny at the end of that one, but it falls flat IMHO. The lesson is, you should have never assumed you had a right to your body and your sexuality to begin with, woman. Honestly, what do you think they’d do if a disease was discovered that only threatened married women, but was preventable with a simple shot? They’d demand all us married women get it, perhaps even pass a law requiring the shot. We can’t have our respectable wives and mothers dropping dead on us, eh?
It’s the whores, the sluts and the Lolitas that these Christian groups really want to punish. Yes, they do have it out for us married-not-enslaved women too, but they really despise “loose women”. How else can you explain the outrage these groups have exhibited over a vaccine that protects all sexually active women against a deadly disease? I don’t think you can.
4 Responses
"People who advocate freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without the awful roar of the thunder and lightning.
Without struggle, there is no progress. This struggle might be a moral one. It might be a physical one. It might be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. People may not get all that they pay for in this world, but they certainly pay for all that they get." ~ Frederick Douglas
“It’s the whores, the sluts and the Lolitas that these Christian groups really want to punish.”
Hm.. who is calling people these names again? If you can’t cite a source, it’s you.
That said, I think the vaccine should be widely available. Perhaps not mandatory, as it is relatively new and untested, but there you go.
-Religious nonwhacko
Bill Maher is being dishonest. Salon already had to issue a correction after Maher was caught lying about Sen. Coburn’s position.
And he also misrepresents the position of the Family Research Council. FRC’s position on the HPV vaccine is exactly the opposite of what he claims:
FRC announced in October of 2005 that we would enthusiastically support the development of the vaccine and federal approval of its use, including its addition to the list of vaccines recommended to physicians and of those made available to lower-income families through the Vaccines for Children program. Virtually all pro-family public policy organizations have announced similar support for the vaccine itself.
http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=LH07B02&f=WX06K03
Maher, like his friend Ann Coulter, is more concerned about demonizing his enemies than he is in telling the truth.
Joe,
From where I stand Mr. Maher’s point is that organizations such as yours have made statements against the HPV vaccine because you all are concerned that it may encourage non-married women and teenage girls to engage in sex. Bridget Maher, an employee of your organization, is on the record as stating “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex,” (New Scientist). If this is not the official position of the FRC, why has she made this comment and why has the FRC done nothing to publicly retract the statement?
Ms. Maher is not the only one from your organization to make such statements. Tony Perkins has stated that “it [the vaccine] sends the wrong message” (Fortune).
There is also an alert on your organization’s site dtd Feb 9, 2007 about Governor Perry’s move to make the vaccine mandatory wherein a reference is made to the myth of “safe sex”, complete with scare quotes.
I believe that these unretracted statements paint a picture of an organization that is not remotely concerned about the actual health or welfare of women. In fact, I believe it is reasonable to conclude from these statements, similar statements from other like-minded organizations and the combined actions of all of you that the entire shtick is about making sex as scary as possible.
Furthermore, over the years organizations such as yours have repeatedly misrepresented the effectiveness of condoms in the transmission of STDs as well as overrepresented the failure rates of condoms and other forms of birth control. And don’t even get me started on your organization’s stance on abortion. There is also the entire anti-birth control wing of the abstinence only movement to consider which has only gotten bolder in recent years.
As for painting Bill Maher as being in the same category as Ann Coulter, that’s absurd. Ann Coulter is a category. No one on the left comes close to her. I challenge you to find one person on the left that has consistently stated things that are comparable to the Ann Coulter quotes in the provided link.
Continuing the Discussion