Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Do Christians really want women to die?

ArchPundit reads WorldNetDaily so I don't have to. Today, he linked to a column written by nutjob Jill Stanek, who in turn wrote about how horrible the HPV vaccine is. I'm almost starting to think that conservative Christians want there to be horrible consequences for sex, because it makes it dangerous. Stanek says:

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 [sic] way to avoid HPV or cervical cancer: abstinence.

Let's ignore the fact that she calls any sex before marriage "promiscuous." No, Jill, actually, that's not the only full-proof way to avoid HPV. Twenty percent of women are forced to have sex before they reach their twenties. So I guess you have to add "not getting raped" to that list of "full-proof" (dumbass) ways to avoid HPV.

Fig has pointed out that HPV can live on surfaces for a short while. It's possible to infect yourself by touching an HPV-laden surface, and then touching yourself. So we also have to add "not touching things" to the list of foolproof ways to avoid HPV.

Then Stanek gets into full-self-righteous mode and gets all judgmental on the slutties:

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.

Seriously, Stanek has absolutely no idea why a woman would want to marry a man who has had sex? "I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you. What, you're not a virgin? Get lost, tramp!" Is this really what goes through the mind of conservative Christians? Fewer than 10% of Americans are virgins when they get married. So when a woman meets a guy, she has a roughly 90% chance of picking one that has had sex at some point in his life. Those really aren't such great odds when we're talking about a disease that's (a) incredibly common, (b) easy to catch, (c) easy to prevent, and (d) can kill you.

UPDATE: Stanek shows up in the comments and largely apologizes for her attitude towards non-virgins at the end. What she doesn't mention is that many thousands of women are exposed to this virus, even though they do everything "right." This is a simple way to protect a woman from a virus that she is very likely to be exposed to during her life, possibly even against her will. Remember, even, that the adultery rate in American marriage is roughly 40%.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think this vaccine should be made mandatory. Those who refuse their daughters the vaccine should be made to sign a statement saying why the refused it and to take financial responsiblity in case their daughter gets cancer. Let them start being responsible for their own decisions. And let their daughters know the real reason why they will die of cancer...

Anonymous said...

I have one 4 letter word for Jill:

Rape.

It can happen even to good Christians. Bummer, that.

Anonymous said...

Oh, a further thought.

I could be wrong here, being Jewish and all, but I thought a central teaching of Christianity was that Jesus forgives.

So some guy has a good time, sleeps with a few women or men or both, and then realizes the terrible error of his ways and gets saved. Now he wants to marry a good Christian girl. Jill wants the girl to turn him down flat based on his past behavior. Perhaps she should ask herself "WWJD?"

But, as I said before, I could have the whole thing wrong.

Jill Stanek said...

I received an email the day my column was posted from a pregnancy care center worker, stating in part:

If a man or a woman has turned away from promiscuous behavior and is committed to following God, who are we to continue to throw the past in his or her face? God's desire is to give us life, to give us beauty for our ashes, not for His followers to be the continuous accusers.

There are certainly potential reasons why a virtuous young woman might not want to marry a guy, but how can a past that is radically different from the present be one of the them?


I instantly felt bad and realized the last sentence of the paragraph most problematic to you all was merciless. I posted her email in the comments section of my blog and agreed. I'm sorry.

Of course I believe in forgiveness, from above and toward each other. And I believe in second chances. Lord knows I've been given more than two.

The point of my column, as Archpundit gleaned, was that Winokur focused not on the cause of HPV but how to try to avoid just one consequence of the cause, which was wrong of her. (The HPV vaccine only guards against 4 of over 100 HPV strains, for instance.)