Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

Texas has apparently just banned marriage. Why? Because they have passed Proposition 2, which nullifies anything "equal or identical to" marriage.

Marriage is identical to marriage, y'all. If a judge refuses to be an activist and follows the letter of the law you have just passed, no marriages can be performed in Texas anymore. (Nor can business partnerships, civil unions, common law marriages...)

And all the usual stupidities are being waved in happy huzzahs over this.

Cathie Adams, president of Texas Eagle Forum, hoped that Texans respond to the election outcome "by renewing their commitments to God's model of marriage and family." Last time I looked, the Bible had stories of polygamy (Solomon), adultery (David), impregnating the servants in involuntary surrogacy (Abraham), and incest (Lot) so just WHAT moral model of marriage are y'all talkin' about? Jesus, who never married at all, but ran around with a mixed-gender commune?

Ann Hettinger with Concerned Women for America, noted, "Texas' amendment short-circuits liberal groups from hijacking traditional marriage and morphing it into a hodgepodge of relationships used only for the benefit of their agenda." In other words, "When will some people get it through their heads that we're all equal in America, but some are more equal than others? How dare non-majority members expect equal treatment under the law?!"

Nice comeback from the Star Telegram, though. How does this amendment improve or correct a deficiency in state government when it was already against state law to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple?

Will there be a decrease in the heterosexual divorce rate (which in Texas is 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per 1,000 people) now that the "sanctity of marriage" is dictated in the Texas Constitution as a union between one man and one woman only? That truly would be an accomplishment, given that the state's divorce rate is highest among born-again Christians -- the group most vocal in backing the amendment.

Because when God defined marriage as "one man, one woman" he really only meant "at a time" and doesn't mind those divorces at all, y'know. How many of those people quoting Leviticus against the gays have even noticed 21:14 and 22:13? I'm REALLY sure they haven't read Matthew 5:32!

There's a vaccine out there that has passed all trials with flying colors. It has few side effects. It protects almost 100% against a certain type of cancer. It will be available next year.

Huzzah, right? I mean, people are going to be lining up for this, right? Nobody could possibly be pro-cancer, right?

Well, unless that cancer has anything to do with sex.

A new vaccine that protects against cervical cancer has set up a clash between health advocates who want to use the shots aggressively to prevent thousands of malignancies and social conservatives who say immunizing teenagers could encourage sexual activity.

Although the vaccine will not become available until next year at the earliest, activists on both sides have begun maneuvering to influence how widely the immunizations will be employed. (Article echoed here and here if you can't get past the registration.)

The best time to vaccinate a person is before they are exposed to something. Therefore, the doctors making the vaccine want to jab little girls before or just as they hit puberty, to be absolutely sure that they can resist a common form of VD before it turns into the two most common forms of cancer. And apparently a prick in the arm will immediately lead to an overwhelming urge to put pricks somewhere else.

"I've talked to some who have said, 'This is going to sabotage our abstinence message,'" said Gene Rudd, associate executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations... "There are those who would say, 'We can provide a better, healthier alternative than the vaccine, and that is to teach abstinence,'" Rudd said.

In a statement, the conservative Family Research Council said it will "monitor the development of these vaccines, the FDA drug approval process, the development of recommendations for their use and the marketing of these vaccines." ... "While we welcome medical advances such as an HPV vaccine, it remains clear that practicing abstinence until marriage and fidelity within marriage is the single best way of preventing the full range of sexually transmitted diseases."

Let's call a spade a spade. This is not about curing VD, it is about curing cancer! If you state that any philosophy is "a better, healthier alternative than the vaccine" you are de facto saying that women deserve to die of cancer.

In the Middle East, fathers and brothers kill family females they think have lost their virtue. The American way is more passive - let cancer kill the little whores, because if they were just Good Girls [tm], they wouldn't catch the bug in the first place. After all, by virtue of her virtue, a Truely Good Girl will never fall from her pedestal, not even once and regret it. She cannot ever possibly be molested or raped. And because she totally controls everyone's virtue, it is simply not thinkable that her husband could bring biological baggage into a marriage, or ever stray and bring home a nasty.

So not only is their belief unrealistic, they want us all to live by that mindset, even if we don't share it. [A] former member of the conservative group Focus on the Family serves on the federal panel that is playing a pivotal role in deciding how the vaccine is used. "What the Bush administration has done has taken this coterie of people and put them into very influential positions in Washington," said James A. Morone Jr., a professor of political science at Brown University. "And it's having an effect in debates like this."

As the bumper sticker says, focus on your own damn family. I will not sit quietly by as sexuality is criminalized. First step is to chisel back access to birth control, because women ought to be punished with pregnancy if they have sex. Now they're going one step farther - withholding lifesaving medicine and calling the consequences our fault. Think I'm overstating it? How many times have you heard that AIDS is a gay disease and "those people" deserve to get it - even if it's a straight person who got it from a blood transfusion? It's a very short step away from that to blaming women - if you just stayed pure, you wouldn't have gotten cooter cancer, you little slut.

And that's what some folks focus on - the sex to the exclusion of all else. Doctors willing to give teens STD vaccine says the UPI, mentioning sex and VD four times and cancer once. This isn't about sex, it's about lives. Cervical cancer is the second leading form of cancer among women worldwide. From the original article, cervical cancer strikes more than 10,000 U.S. women each year, killing more than 3,700. The vaccine appears to be virtually 100 percent effective against two of the most common cancer-causing HPV strains.

If you care about the women in your life, get on the phone and give Congress hell if they don't make the vaccine available. Then get on the phone and give the media hell too. If people claim to be pro-life, then they have to be pro all lives. They don't get to withhold medical protection from the women who don't live up to their standards. They don't get to be on the side of a killer disease and claim it as the moral ground.

ETA: Y'know, I didn't realize it this morning, but now I'm thinking that the secret reason that the far right is fighting the vaccine is BECAUSE so much of the abstinence message hinges on, you guessed it, cancer and death. There are still plenty of people citing that bogus study saying that abortion increases the incidence of breast cancer, and I half-remember some anti-condom "information" that linked fatalities and condom use.

When you stop and think of it in that way, then of course the religio-right groups have got to fight this vaccine tooth and nail, because when your scare tactics depend on the fear of death and someone's gone out and come up with a sure-fire cure for one of those forms of death, what are you left to frighten people with?

The Bad News
Joan of Arcadia has been cancelled. While I agree that the second season was rocky, I looked forward to the arc they were intimating for the third season. Furthermore, I'm pissed that the overall reason wasn't just low ratings, but low ratings among young viewers. You wanna have payback for your advertisers, Sparky? Stop piddling after the kids with their part-time, minimum-wage allowances and pay attention to us pissed off geezers with the big salaries and large budgets for discretionary spending.

I have no idea what this means for the second season DVDs, which were tentatively scheduled for September just before the new season comes out. There are episodes I badly want on DVD, particularly the one I missed.

The Good News
PERSONAL EDITION:
Mrs. Palmer gets out of the hospital tomorrow! They're waiting for her heart to get back to full strength before they go in and explore the kidney part of the problem; the heart is already strong enough that the cardiologist is talking about talking to her in a couple of weeks.

POLITICAL EDITION:
The text of the State of Wisconsin Pharmacy Board disciplinary hearings for Neil T. Noesen have been posted. Noeson was brought before the Board for asking a patient the purpose of a birth control prescription, refusing to fill said prescription, and refusing to turn over the information to another pharmacist. The decision is against Noeson, probably in part because he sounds like he was equally obstructionist during the hearing:

When asked whether he had an obligation to make certain that the pharmacies knew the extent of his conscientious objections and the acts which he would not perform, Respondent answered, “That’s a good question. Is that a good answer or not?” At another point in the hearing, Respondent was asked to explain how an employer could accommodate a pharmacist’s refusal to transfer a prescription if they did not know that the pharmacist would refuse to do so. Respondent again replied, “That’s a good question. That’s my answer.”

Turns out that Mr. Moral had written a letter, which he didn't give to most of the people involved, outlining what he would do in contraceptive cases. For all the good that did: When he asked why he did not follow his own protocol, Respondent was unable to offer any explanation. [TR. at 128] Instead, he admitted that he did not offer to call the prescriber and he did not do what he wrote to Mr. Scott in his e-mail that he would do.

That moral high ground is sinking lower by the second...

( Fun quotes to use in further discussion of the Conscience Clause! )