Honestly, even if they won't even pretend to care about saving lives, wouldn't preventing more cervical cancer also save money?

Dear MyChalkLine, any parent who would neglect to administer a perfectly safe vaccine to their children, regardless of efficacy, for any reason besides those which are out of their hands (egg allergy, poverty, etc.) is a BAD PARENT, and children should not have to suffer at the hands of a bad parent. That's why the government needs to mandate this vaccine. There are plenty of crazy, batshit, bad, unfit parents out there who would neglect to protect their children because of a (fucking stupid, irrelevant, subjective) moral/religious principle they hold.

Your comments make me literally sick to my stomach.

And, for the record, just got my last Gardasil booster two weeks ago, haven't been stricken mentally retarded and I have signed up for any super-slutty gang-bangs yet. But who knows, I'm only 25 and I've already needed a cone biopsy, maybe I might as well just go for it. Four straight years of being with the same man didn't spare me this fate.

@MyChalkLine, who wrote: " You going on to claim my logic includes sexually transmitted disease as "unavoidable" is ridiculous."

No, MyChalkLine, it's not. All I'm trying to do is check whether or not you will follow your own criteria to their logical consequences. My impression / gut feeling is that you don't, that you are willing to put up with inconsistencies in your worldview. I'm merely checking that. (What my opinion on the topic is, is irrelevant, for instance.)

So, you do then claim that, since it is (barely) possible to completely avoid HPV by never engaging in sex (or kissing), then there is no need to mandate vaccination, right?

But, if you do think that such radical solutions are sufficient to preclude mandatory vaccination, then it is difficult to see how you could be in favor of any mandatory vaccination at all, even in the cases (measles, rubeola, etc. if I'm not mistaken) where you said you would favor mandatory vaccination.

After all, there always is something the common citizen could do to avoid the danger of infection. It might be a difficult thing to do (say, always wear a gas mask? or a fully isolated suit, like an astronaut's?) -- a choice that the common citizen could make -- that would protect him/her from any infectious disease.

In this case, how can you support any kind of mandatory vaccination at all? Or do you then drop your support for any mandatory vaccination and prefer to consider all vaccination as a matter of choice?

Again, I'm just intrigued by the consequences of your choice of criteria. I'm not trying to 'be ridiculous' or anything, I'm simply honestly curious about your worldview.

Has anyone mentioned that—like all "mandatory" vaccines—parents are able to "opt out" of vaccinating their children? There's way better things to hit Perry on, unfortunately Bachman's not going to go there because it's not the insane shit that she disagrees with.

Maybe it's because I've been watching Arrested Development again, but does anyone else imagine Michelle and Marcus pounding handfuls of TIMOsil between tour stops?

wow. I really feel like a few of you owe me something for making it through all those comments.

You can cite all sorts of scenarios but that doesn't mean you have a right to decide for parents how to approach sex (education) and reproductive medical decisions with their children.

But that's the point, MyChalkLine -- it's not about sex, it's about a disease these children will be exposed to, without any way of knowing that they're being exposed to it. (If kissing transmits it, they don't even have to grow up to get it.)

You see, that is the main point: just like other mandatory vaccinations, it's not about sex education, it's about preventing a disease you have no other means to defend yourself against. If you reduce that simply to sex education, you're ignoring this fact.

@41 KittenKoder

http://usmessageboards.com/showthread.ph…

Do you see any irony with you playing US vs THEM on message boards? When was the last time Slog deleted one of your comments? URNSANE

@MyChalkLine, do you defend a parent's right to administer faith healing to their severely ill child to the complete exclusion of modern medicine? When is society allowed to step in and say "hey, you're a shitty parent"? Apparently not when it comes to rendering an extremely common and potentially fatal virus effectively harmless.

It's only the party of life if that life hasn't actually been born yet. Or it is a life that fits into one of their approved categories, which don't seem to include women or LGBT people.

Dan's statement about Republicans wanting women dead made Doonesbury's "mud line" today.

I've said it before, but Dan is a fascinating case of how politics makes you dumb. In his day job (the one he justly became famous(-ish) for), he's able to tease out the finest of nuances in the stupefyingly complex universe of human emotional and sexual relations. He disentangles prejudice, fear, and just plain stupidity from the web of reality and, with humor and compassion and sometimes just the right amount of tough love, points people towards answers so obvious it makes you smack your forehead. The guy is a genius when it comes to that.

But when it comes to politics, suddenly he's a freaking neanderthal. The world becomes black and white, populated with good guys and bad guys, and he wants all Republicans dead, because Republicans want women dead, because they're eeeevil, etc. etc. etc.

The contrast is breathtaking.

It seems so strange to me that people are so up in arms about the HPV but schools give Hep B vaccine without so much as a whisper of protest. Guess what, Hep B is mostly a sexually transmitted disease. . . we don't really think that all those young people are getting it to prevent exposure from needlesticks in a healthcare setting do we?

From the linked Time article: "It a measure of the depth of suspicion on both sides that something almost universally hailed as a medical triumph still became a subject of controversy."

No, it's a measure of the asinine, backwards, imperious lunacy of the Religious Right. I hate this "both sides" bullshit that has become the new norm. Sometimes one side is just plain wrong (factually and/or ethically). The response of the right-wing policy groups in response to the backlash is just so much misdirection, because their opinion on people's consensual sexual behaviors (yes, including teenagers) has no place in dictating public policy. Whether their proposed "disinhibition" idea has merit or not is immaterial (it's also patently ridiculous: there are a LOT of other STIs, many worse, on average, than any strain of HPV, and of course we don't worry about seat-belt laws disinhibiting reckless driving, food safety regulations disinhibiting overeating, etc.), and the only logical reason to raise an immaterial issue is to drum up controversy around something that should otherwise pass easily, which means you ARE actively opposed to it. Of course, that requires that one grants my premise of regulating consensual sexual behaviors being out of the purview of public policy, which these assholes obviously don't, but either way, no one should actually be granting them any degree of consideration, as they're either operating from a flawed premise or reaching a conclusion that does not follow from the non-flawed premises.

"'Unlike diseases for which there are required immunizations,' explains Klepacki, 'this is a disease you don't catch by sneezing or coughing. It's linked to a behavior. You don't contract HPV by sitting in a classroom. So this is a different issue.'"

Except that like sitting in a classroom, it's a behavior in which (in spite of years of pro-abstinence propaganda in those same classrooms and anti-sex religious mandates) the overwhelming majority of the population engages. One could avoid those other illnesses by living in a hermetically-sealed bubble and never touching another person or anything another touched - those are behaviorally-linked too, it's just that you don't disapprove of the behaviors that expose people to e.g. measles. Ideological positions have no place in public policy because they are not evidence-based/fact-based, and public policy is limited in that it can only deal with what actually happens. We can legislate Utopia (whatever version) all we want, but that's not going to make it a reality (there's a similar problem with banning abortion: we know from historical and cross-national data that women terminate pregnancies at about the same rates whether abortion is legal or illegal, and the only difference is how safe the procedures are; from a public health or pro-life standpoint, even if one thinks abortion is wrong, the evidence clearly shows that the best LAWS around abortion make access cheap and easy, but also strive to provide access to contraception and comprehensive sexuality education, which can delay onset of sexual activity and definitely reduces the number of unintended pregnancies, as well as the spread of STIs). The biggest issue I have with these kinds of policy proposals is that they don't make sense EVEN IF I GRANT THE IDEOLOGICAL POSITIONS OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT (the second-biggest problem is with those ideological positions), because the law just doesn't function like they think/wish it does.

The Religious Right should call themselves Old-Testamentists, not Evangelists. They never read the part of the New Testament where the prostitute washed the feet of Jesus and he didn't kick her in the groin.

They are not Christians.