For those who recall Fran Eaton and Jill Stanek attacking Debbie Halvorson for having HPV and essentially engaging in slut shaming regardless of the fact that it was Debbie’s first husband who exposed her to HPV. Let’s review their attacks on Halvorson:
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.
Yes I did. And I stand by that. Adam Kinzinger has posted Fran Eaton’s most recent column bringing up that shameful episode on his website.
Once you’ve been dubbed a “mean girl” by a fellow journalist, you tend to react by becoming more thick-skinned and meaner, or you back off and try to adjust your attitude.
My having won that “mean girl” moniker a few years ago is the first thing I think of when I read about U.S. Rep. Debbie Halvorson. Before being elected to Congress in 2008, Halvorson was state Sen. Emil Jones’ lieutenant. During her final years in the Illinois Senate, she willingly jumped into a vat of legislative hot oil by sponsoring a bill that would mandate 9- to 11-year-old girls receive the human papilloma virus vaccine.
Adding any other vaccine doses to Illinois’ already overbearing 38 now required before a child can be admitted to school always should be met with caution. But mandating the newly developed HPV vaccine was especially troubling. HPV, a virus that experts say often leads to cervical cancer, is transmitted only by sexual contact or by needle exchange. To require 9- to 11-year-old girls to have an HPV shot for school attendance was a serious measure that should require parental information, lots of medical assessment and clear debate.
That’s where the problem arose. Halvorson launched a campaign for the HPV mandate by publicly admitting her own battle with HPV. Upon initiation, it seemed like a public service to promote the vaccine, but when it was discovered that Halvorson had been involved in a legislative group that was financially assisted by vaccine promoters, her cause lost its sheen. We learned soon after that the vaccine makers had invested heavily in legislative groups throughout the country, planning to sweep the nation state by state with profit-inducing HPV vaccine mandates.
That’s when the situation in Illinois got testy.
Healthy queries as to Halvorson’s own legislative background on the issue, her political ties and her rationale for the HPV vaccine push were turned into frank online discussions. As a result, a couple of us concerned about the vaccine mandate were dubbed “mean girls” by a fellow female columnist.
So, when viewing a YouTube video showing Halvorson’s Joliet office as the gathering spot for protesters who had just shouted at folks going into an Americans for Prosperity rally in Joliet last week, I hesitated to address it. After all, holding Halvorson’s campaign workers accountable for what they clearly did might raise that “mean girl” label again. And gee, was it worth it?
Two of the people attempting to intimidate concerned 11th District voters away from the Sept. 15 gathering to promote free markets and lower taxes and to oppose Obamacare and a scary economy clearly were connected with the Halvorson campaign. The photos and videos shot by concerned citizen journalists who followed the protesters back to the Halvorson office clearly make that point.
Halvorson says she had nothing to do with the protest, and she denies her campaign workers were involved in putting Hitleresque mustaches on protesters’ signs of conservative commentator Glenn Beck, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Halvorson’s Republican opponent, Adam Kinzinger.
All we can do is take Halvorson’s word that she knew nothing, but we can say for certain her campaign workers knew fully what was going on. They were in the middle of the whole ordeal.
Except it turns out not to be true as Bill Preston came forward saying he and one other person were behind the Hitler signs and not connected to the coordinated campaign. More interesting is that a quick web search turned up a picture of Bill Preston protesting BP in Chicago apparently on his own. So, not only is Kinzinger promoting a factually debunked story, he’s giving creedence to a woman who called his opponent a slut.
By that standard we should expect Kinzinger to start talking in detail about his own sexual history given Eaton’s standards. Or maybe not since I don’t really want to know. However, the other consistent choice is to point out that Fran Eaton is a mean and detestable human being who compared a decent public servant to a porn star.