little girls deserve cancer because I’m uncomfortable with sex

This story is a typical example of the amazing moral contortions that reactionary social conservatives seem to be able to perform to justify interfering with, and indeed harming, others to satisfy their own arbitrary and irrational beliefs.

As you may know, Australian scientists recently developed a vaccine for HPV, a sexually-transmitted virus directly linked to cervical cancer. The vaccine is being rolled out rapidly – after all, it’s a relatively cheap and easy way to save lives.

Enter the ‘conservative’ southern United States. Despite the obvious health benefits, children there are being denied the vaccine because the decreased risk of contracting an STD will inevitably turn them into sex-crazed harlots, walking the streets at night seeking anonymous partners to help them destroy the very fabric of society in an orgy of pre-marital sex. This reasoning is along similar lines to that employed by the US government to require foreign aid organisations to promote abstinence, rather than contraception, as the solution to controlling AIDS and other diseases (even when the guy charged with enforcing this policy is himself using high-priced prostitutes… but then what else do we expect from a country where a leading candidate for the 2008 presidency says this).

We can therefore deduce that the following ‘moral’ standards are being applied:

• 1. I have the right to prevent other people receiving medical care

• 2. It is better to try to control an unproven and unknown risk of a young girl becoming promiscuous than it is to prevent a devastating, fatal disease

• 3. The only reason people don’t constantly and randomly have unprotected sex with strangers is that they might contract a disease that they have probably never heard of and which carries relatively mild symptoms (other than sometimes causing cervical cancer at some point in the future, of course)

• 4. People having sex is bad as a general rule

• 5. It affects me personally if strangers have sex

• 6. Even though I am willingly helping to ensure that, statistically speaking, other human beings will die when they otherwise would not, I am not a murderer or even an accessory to murder

Add your own – it’s fun and easy!

(thanks OJM)