Daily Dolt: How To Marginalize Oneself Take 3643

It wasn’t enough to attack Debbie Halvorson in a local blog, Jill Stanek decided to take it national and add an actress

So when renowns like actress Marissa Jaret Winokur and Illinois state Sen. Debbie Halvorson divulged their history of HPV as the basis for conducting a crusade against it, you’d think they would discourage the destructive behavior causing it by talking about it, such as:

* Discussing the number of sex partners they had throughout their lifetime and how each one increased the likelihood of contracting HPV, or conversely how one can contract HPV from a sole encounter;

* Discussing whether they realized at the time their sex partners carried HPV, which most people do not;

* Discussing whether it was their husbands who passed HPV on to them after sleeping with other women, demonstrating a good reason for fidelity.

But instead of speaking against the cause of HPV, Winokur and Halvorson are instead promoting a vaccination to halt just a tiny fraction of the multitude of consequences of this destructive behavior.

Here is where they erred. After having publicly presented themselves as Exhibit A in this discussion they tried to say, “I have a history of this disease, but my solution excludes assessing the history of my disease.” That is illogical and dangerous. As an RN I’ll add it is bad medicine.

When I presented the aforementioned topics for discussion on a blog this week, liberals accused me of hate, extremism, personal attacks, venom and vitriol.

You mean when you compared Debbie Halvorson to a porn star? Why would anyone think that is a personal attack or venomous, or vitriolic. Poor Jill, she’s just so misunderstood. How else could one make an argument about being against a vaccine without demanding the details of a persons personal life?

She’s also lying, of course. The larger point has been made that the most effective way to reduce these risks is comprehensive sex education. Abstinence only programs are massive failures often leading to greater risk taking when individuals do eventually have sex. Comprehensive sex education provides accurate information on the consequences of sex, but also provides the information about how to minimize those consequences.

Of course, Stanek thinks that premarital sex is comparable to smoking:

So to answer Perry’s question, everyone would welcome a lung cancer vaccine, but wouldn’t turn around and say, “Great, let’s all smoke!” Because we know smoking causes other cancers like laryngeal, esophageal, stomach and pancreatic as well as health problems like heart disease and infertility.

Furthermore, this behavior endangers the health of other people who come in contact with the smoker, like babies born with low birth weight.

Interestingly, the most ardent critics of smoking are lawmakers, who have increasingly sought to discourage this destructive behavior by making it more difficult.

HPV is also the consequence of a destructive behavior, sex outside of marriage.

95 percent of people have premarital sex.

It is certainly true that sex can be unhealthy when it’s simply random sex, but to suggest that 95 percent of Americans are engaging in inherently self-destructive behavior is absurd. Furthermore, when premarital sex is so prevalent it kicks the legs out from underneath the argument that a vaccine for one particular STD is going to promote premarital sex. Premarital sex is and has been the norm.

I’ll repeat, there is nothing conservative commentators like Stanek can say that will cause them to be marginalized.