The American Taliban: Honor Killing on the Installment Plan

[DaveColorado]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050530/pollitt

Virginity or Death!

Katha Pollitt

Imagine a vaccine that would protect women from a serious gynecological cancer. Wouldn't that be great? Well, both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline recently announced that they have conducted successful trials of vaccines that protect against the human papilloma virus. HPV is not only an incredibly widespread sexually transmitted infection but is responsible for at least 70 percent of cases of cervical cancer, which is diagnosed in 10,000 American women a year and kills 4,000. Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty, and HPV--and, in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer--goes poof. Not so fast: We're living in God's country now. The Christian right doesn't like the sound of this vaccine at all. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful," Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, "because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex." Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they've probably never heard of.

I remember when people rolled their eyeballs if you suggested that opposition to abortion was less about "life" than about sex, especially sex for women. You have to admit that thesis is looking pretty solid these days. No matter what the consequences of sex--pregnancy, disease, death--abstinence for singles is the only answer. Just as it's better for gays to get AIDS than use condoms, it's better for a woman to get cancer than have sex before marriage. It's honor killing on the installment plan.

-more

[Nobody]

1. News Flash for the Talibornagain

Women who are married and only have sex with their husbands are at risk for cervical cancer. Does that mean that no woman should EVER have sex? Gee, maybe there's something to that. No more cervical cancer and we don't need a drug to do it. No more sinners being born. That's got to be a plus.

By the way, the Alien Residential Real Estate Agents Society will be pleased. There's been a bidding war on our planet. How soon can those pesky humans vacate?

[Crunchy Frog]

2. She should still be punished...

for the fact that her husband wasn't a virgin when she married him. A truly pure woman will only marry a man of the utmost purity. If there's any impurity in any of their pasts, God will kill them off.

[kestrel91316]

3. Um, what about if somebody doesn't want to risk getting HPV

from getting raped????? Oh too bad, she must have asked for it, right?