So you want me to believe that the conservative resistance to the HPV vaccine is purely about ‘Parental Rights’, or concerns that our children are being over immunized? How naïve do you think I am? (I’m not even touching Michelle ‘Madman’ Bachmann’s Jenny McCarthy’s like idiocy.)
Let’s take a quick look at recommended immunizations for children according to CDC.
Chicken Pox –Air and direct contact vectors
Diphtheria – Air and direct contact
Hib – Air and direct contact
HepA – Personal contact, Food, Water
Hep B – Blood, bodily fluids
Measles – Air and Direct Contact
Mumps – Air and direct contact
Pertussis – air and direct contact
Polio – via the mouth
Pneumococcus – air and direct contact
Rotavirus – through the mouth
Rubella – air and direct contact
Tetanus – breaks in the skin
HPV – sexual activity
Only ONE of these immunizations has the conservatives in a lather, but I’m supposed to accept the premise that it’s NOT about the sex, but only a logical question of parental rights that somehow doesn’t get raised for any of the other immunizations? Yeah, right, and I’ve got some Unicorns to sell you.
If this was a fringe group grousing about the injections, sort like the fluoridation nuts of years past, I could ignore the whole issue, but these people are in the driver’s seat for the selection process for the presidential nominee. Leading politicians are bending knees and groveling to these idiots who believe it is better to risk cancer than sexual activity.
I’d be careful tossing out the term ‘misogyny’ in this debate. First off everyone talk about cervical cancer, but that is not the only cancer linked to the HPV virus, Anal cancers and oral cancers have both been linked to HPV and both occur in men who have been infected. So your example of a married couple and the woman carries all the risk is uninformed. He could give it to her, get it back during oral sex and develop oral cancers. For both genders infection is mostly symptom free. Secondly there has been some efforts to get boys immunized because even ignoring these cancers issues they are a vector of transmission, but the efforts have also been blocked by the social conservatives.
So I do not believe that misogyny directly is the issue but rather a desire to put the sexual revolution back into the bottle and invoke a mythical time when teenagers didn’t screw.
Bob is dead right about parental choice having nothing to do with this. Any parent who wants to opt out of vacinations has a number of mechanisms to do so and religious objections is at the top of the list. Why have both of you ignored the mysogyny in this?????
If _MEN_ were getting cancer of the penis, the vaccine would not only be acceptable, it would be sacrosanct and covered by insurance. (FYI – in Florida, the non-covered vaccine, delivered in three or four injections, runs over $400 plus office visits.) Also, since women are often getting the virus from their partner, even a single partner, sex has nothing to do with it. A woman could easily get the virus from her husband if he’d been a bit of a slut before they married. HE’D have few to no symptoms. She would risk infertility and cancer. Nice.
This situation exemplfies why I will not and can not switch parties, even though there is much value in the fiscal conservatives. It is not just the pro-choice thing that matters to me. It is the fact that the Republican party – yes, Brad, I mean ALL of it!! – does not perceive me as a woman as being fully human and deserving of equal treatment under the law. I don’t want to be a “protected class” but I can’t approach getting equity in any other way. THAT is disgusting!!
I think there are four levels of meaning here. The text of the writer, the readers understanding of the text, the conscious intent of the writer, and the unconscious beliefs of the writer. I think you need to include the unconscious beliefs of the reader as well.
Any fair reading of the text would lead to the same conclusion I made. Is it the fault of the reader for misunderstanding the intent of the writer? Or the fault of the writer?
I disagree with you here. After all if it was so clear why did you need to alter the quote to make your point?
Huckabee was deeply flawed from the Social conservatives point of view. He raised taxes and had nanny state tendencies as governor. the social conservatives ended up splitting their votes between candidates and McCain slid in. Or are you postulating that because Mccain won he represented the heart of the republican party?
If the social conservatives do not wield this wort of power then where the attacks on the HPV vaccine? Both Bachmann and Santorum went after him on that as a way to bring down the leader of the pack. Both are skilled politicians who were they palying to and why were those people important in these pols minds?
I disagree with you about Obama being far left, but this threat is NOT about Obama and we’re not debating that here.
Hmm…
I think there are four levels of meaning here. The text of the writer, the readers understanding of the text, the conscious intent of the writer, and the unconscious beliefs of the writer.
If you intended to attack “social conservatives” you should have written that, but you didn’t. Any fair reading of the text would lead to the same conclusion I made. Is it the fault of the reader for misunderstanding the intent of the writer? Or the fault of the writer?
BTW, when you say “social conservatives”, don’t you really mean ‘fundamentalist religious conservatives’? That is why I used Falwell as an example.
Your analysis of ideological control of the Republican and Democratic Parties is flawed. If Falwell types really controlled the party, then why wasn’t Huckabee the nominee of the party in 2008 instead of McCain?
And I suggest that the Maxine Waters types did control who was the nominee of the Democratic Party in 2008. That’s why Obama was the nominee instead of Hillary Clinton. The reason Kucinich wasn’t the nominee is because though ideologically pure, Kucinich is a poor politician whereas Obama is a good politician.
Obama, Maxine Waters, and Kucinich are ideological peas in a pod. But Obama is a far left politician who is good at pretending to be a left of center politician, Just as Bill Clinton was a left of center politician who was good at pretending to be a centrist. Kucinich doesn’t have the capacity to pretend, and so is unelectable.
Kucinich on the Democratic side is a good example of where the heart of the party lies. Just as Ron Paul is a good example on the Republican side, (and not someone like Huckabee). And both parties are sensible enough to nominate candidates who are better politicians and more electable than Kucinich or Paul.
To be continued…
“If this was a fringe group grousing about the injections, sort like the fluoridation nuts of years past, I could ignore the whole issue, but these people are in the driver’s seat for the selection process for the presidential nominee. Leading politicians are bending knees and groveling to these idiots who believe it is better to risk cancer than sexual activity.”
Note the bolded phrases. These people clearly does not refer to all conservative, but to a subset of conservatives that are driving the nomination process. Your paraphrase “conservatives are” is erroneous.
To arrive at that ‘logical’ conclusion you make about as many leaps of faith as the global warming catastrophists do when they want to control the use of fossil fuels. Because we all know that all conservatives are the same just as all Democrats are the same. Right? It’s nothing more than Jerry Falwell vs Maxine Waters? Right?
I believe you mean a leap of logic not faith. But lets look at your final point, Falwell vs Waters. Both are extremists for their political philosophy , right and left respectively. If Ms. Waters’ element controlled the nomination process of the Democratic party as solidly as the Social Conservative control the Republican’s nomination process, then Congressman Kucinich would have won the nomination. The far left does not have the same control over the party as the social right does.
zOh those “disgusting” conservatives!
I never called the conservatives disgusting. So your propensity for straw men continues. Disgusted is how I feel about who controls the process. (As I have already noted that does not mean all parties of the process.) By inclination I am a small government leave us alone conservative, but this sort of idiocy is what drove me out of the party.
“[conservatives are] idiots who believe it is better to risk cancer than sexual activity.”
To arrive at that ‘logical’ conclusion you make about as many leaps of faith as the global warming catastrophists do when they want to control the use of fossil fuels. Because we all know that all conservatives are the same just as all Democrats are the same. Right? It’s nothing more than Jerry Falwell vs Maxine Waters? Right?
Oh those “disgusting” conservatives!