John McCain: Luddite
ArchPundit
Seriously, the Straight Talk Express goes to the central repository for intelligent design.
Paul Tsongas would call him a Pander Bear and he’d be right.
Fundie Fun
One is Now a Saint to Compare State Senators to Porn Stars
Lying Gasbag Tom Roeser folks.
You can say anything as a movement conservative and still be taken seriously.
It begs the question as to how the HPV was contracted-an experience that would serve young women by being instructive. When Stanek called on Halvorson to further illustrate that experience, a hail of mud and bricks have rained down on her assailing her for unfairness. Those who flail her do not understand the consequences. Not in the slightest. Of course the bluntness of Stanek’s message was startling. But her bluntly courageous stand should be honored…as should Stanek the pro-life saint…that the answer to serious infection-sometimes physically, always morally-is abstinence before marriage and abstinence in relationships outside marriage. God bless, Jill.
This man has a radio show on WLS and he thinks it’s courageous to attack Halvorson not for her stand on mandatory vaccination, but on her sexual history including if she had been raped, how she could have avoided it.
Nothing they say can stop them from being taken seriously. Nothing.
Today’s Tosser
I’ve been thinking of how one could use a Debbie Does Dallas line to be funny. I came up with a few thoughts on it, such as if someone were discussing a sex education bill or something where one makes clear one is not talking about the individual’s behavior.
However, it’s definitely not funny in the context of talking about someone who has HPV and had a hysterectomy. Repeating it only makes it worse.
It’s fine to criticize the ideas someone has if they share a personal experience, but to imply they are a slut or a porn star in their behavior is over the line. Way over the line. 60 -70 % of the population contracts HPV in some form. Just on the issue of making a message persuasive, telling a majority of people they are dirty filthy people is unhelpful to the message.
How a single individual contracted HPV isn’t the point and trying to embarrass someone who shared an intensely personal part of their medical history only makes the person trying to embarrass her look like a sociopath. Or perhaps that’s just an accurate description of the person trying to embarrass the person with HPV.
What’s hysterical is this line from Stanek:
Back to those liberal bloggers. Their loud demand for ignorance can be interpreted only one of two ways. Either they hold a paternalistic view of women as being too weak to handle the truth or an exploitive view of women who should remain sex objects no matter the cost to their health. There is no other explanation for hysterical protests to shut up about the cause of HPV.
No one wants anyone to shut up about the causes of HPV. In fact, one can look at Debbie Halvorson’s record and see one that advocates comprehensive sex education which has demonstrated far more success in avoiding STDs than does abstinence only education that Stanek supports. Halvorson actually supports giving students age appropriate information to avoid infection instead of pushing a failed policy of abstinence only education. The only people trying to gag anyone in the discussion are those ignorant fools like Stanek who don’t care about evidence, but they are on a religious crusade to punish women who have sex.
Let’s recall what Stanek suggested:
* Halvorson could discuss the number of sex partners she has had throughout her lifetime and how each one increased the likelihood of contracting HPV.
* If Halvorson even had only one sex partner aside from her husband, she could discuss how one can contract HPV from a sole encounter.
* Halvorson could discuss whether she realized at the time her sex partner carried HPV, which most trusting, vulnerable women don’t.
* Halvorson could disclose whether it was her husband who passed HPV on to her after sleeping with other women, demonstrating another reason for chaste behavior outside the marriage bedroom.
* More uncomfortably, if Halvorson contracted HPV through rape, she could discuss ways to avoid rape.But no, Halvorson does not advocate avoiding a risky behavior that leads not only to HPV but to 20+ other STDs and their strains, along with unplanned pregnancy. Halvorson merely advocates trying to avoid the consequences of risky behavior. Shame on her.
Halvorson does advocate avoiding risky behavior and when having sex to reduce the risks involved. That’s dealing with reality that people actually do have sex.
Stanek seems to think if you say just say no enough, people won’t have sex. That has never been true and it never will be true. People are sexual beings and that’s a good thing. Teaching young people how to have healthy relationships is how to best reduce risks across the board. Teaching them to just say no leads to the same level of sex just without the tools to avoid pregnancy and STDs.
Beyond that, even if people make poor decisions regarding sex, there is nothing wrong with reducing the risks of those poor decisions. Under Stanek’s standards seatbelts would only be encouraging teens to speed and therefore morally wrong.
There’s a history of being able to say anything in some conservative circles and not be shunned. Apparently that’s true at the Illinois Review.
Correction
Debbie Halvorson didn’t have cervical cancer, only precancerous cells
Halvorson (D-Crete) learned that her annual Pap smear showed abnormal cells. Follow-up tests revealed precancerous cells on her cervix. She had never even heard of the human papilloma virus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer. Knowing her mother, Joyce De Francesco, now 68, had breast cancer at 49, Halvorson says she had “a panic response.”
“I was pretty scared. If I had let this go, I would have had cervical cancer,” she recalls. She told her doctors: “Just get rid of everything. I want to be done with this.”
Halvorson had a complete hysterectomy. She was 44.
So clearly there is less of a need to be a decent human being regarding her
Debbie Does
Seriously? That passes as acceptable in any company when talking about a woman who had cervical cancer?
For More Context
Debbie Halvorson had a hysterectomy because she had cervical cancer.
The best way to explain to high school students the consequences of their actions is to teach them comprehensive sex education including the biology, the relative risks of behavior choices, abstinence, safe sex, and ultimate consequences. Jill Stanek and her ilk are on a bizarre and strange path that would fit nicely in the world of the Scarlett Letter regardless of whether it is good public health policy. It only matters to them that we punish women for having sex.
There Is Nothing They Can’t Say And Not Be Taken Seriously
The Illinois Review is happy to show off stupidity and just vileness on a regular basis:
So when state Sen. Debbie Halvorson admitted she had HPV and worried others might get it, you would think she’d focus on her behavior that caused her to contract that sexually transmitted disease.
Halvorson would be most helpful by discussing the health consequences of pre- or extra-marital sex. Here are some potential topics:
* Halvorson could discuss the number of sex partners she has had throughout her lifetime and how each one increased the likelihood of contracting HPV.
* If Halvorson even had only one sex partner aside from her husband, she could discuss how one can contract HPV from a sole encounter.
* Halvorson could discuss whether she realized at the time her sex partner carried HPV, which most trusting, vulnerable women don’t.
* Halvorson could disclose whether it was her husband who passed HPV on to her after sleeping with other women, demonstrating another reason for chaste behavior outside the marriage bedroom.
* More uncomfortably, if Halvorson contracted HPV through rape, she could discuss ways to avoid rape.
You know, I’m actually of the mind that there isn’t a need to require the vaccine since, though I have to wonder how stupid a parent would be to not have their daughters vaccinated. However, the nutter brigade as represented above has me wanting to reflexively back the idea. Of course, the law does have an opt-out clause.
The last one really gets me though:” if Halvorson contracted HPV through rape, she could discuss ways to avoid rape”
Blaming the victim. What a peach!
Petey on the Radio
Petey’s upset that people make fun of his obsession with everything gay:
“The little trick is activists like Wayne Besen and Pam Spaulding — who’s sort of a nutty lesbian blogger…She jokes about me, she calls me Porno Pete and they joke that I have some sort of fondness for sadomasochism, just because we’ve exposed this sort of weird stuff.”
It’s not just activists, Petey, I think just about everyone makes fun of you for your obsessions. I have gay friends, I right for a GLBT local newspaper, and have lived in neighborhoods with relatively high levels of GLBT populations and let me say that Petey is the best source of information for sexual practices that are not, ahem, typical.
Petey thinks his point is made by making fun of Besen for when Besen said he had never heard of fisting until Petey brought it up. I don’t think the example quite did what Petey thinks it did.
It’s quite explicit about a gay web site in Massachusetts as well. Apparently, they spend a lot of time on it. A lot.
Teh Stupid
The really, really stupid.
According to the People story’s teaser, Winokur “learned the cause of her cervical cancer and now makes sure other women know how to prevent it.”
The sole cause of cervical cancer is human papillomavirus, or HPV, a sexually transmitted disease.
So Winokur contracted cervical cancer due to sexual promiscuity, or to put it as ambiguously as possible, said Winokur, “I learned about a year ago that HPV, a common virus, causes cervical cancer.”
The “prevention,” according to Winokur? No, not a chaste lifestyle. “There’s a vaccine, which can be given to women before they’re sexually active,” she said. “I’ll encourage my friends’ teenage daughters to get vaccinated.”
Aside from the fact Winokur has no business telling other people’s children about “precautions” to avoid pitfalls of promiscuous sex, her advice stinks. Let’s not address the real cause. Let’s try to avoid the ramifications of the cause.
Winokur or People magazine are fueling the exploitation and health demise of women by refusing to acknowledge the only full-proof way to avoid HPV or cervical cancer: abstinence.
There is only one good reason a virtuous young woman should consider getting the HPV vaccination. That is if the man she plans to marry has had sex with other women, meaning he could be infected with HPV or an array of other STDs. I don’t know why a virtuous young woman would want to marry such a man, but there you go.
IOW, punish women who have sex or marry a man who has had sex with increased likelihood of cancer.
Andy Schlafly’s New Project
Those who used to spend some time on Talk.origins will never forget the duo of Andy and Roger Schlafly and some of the most bizarre claims to surface even in a newsgroup designed to attract the bizarred and weird from useful groups.
Andy has a new project: Conservapedia
Yes, that’s right. Wikipedia is liberally biased.
A fine start includes that under biological terms -e-, there is no term evolution currently listed. What is going to be fun is to watch the fight over how to define such words because old earth creationists, young earth creationists, and intelligent design advocates are all going to have to debate which is correct using….arguments against evolution.
Roger and Andy are still notorious on talk.origins–this search should bring up some of the fun. In terms of who is crazier and dumber between Roger and Andy, it’s sort of a race to the bottom.