This schema works for both the market fundies and their theological brethren.

Last note: when ever I hear the term “value voters” I throw up in my mouth. The single central value of just about any ethical system, including those advanced by the sages of traditional religion, is that it is wrong to use other people as objects, rather than subjects, individuals of intrinsic value. Requiring others to die to avoid unpleasant contradiction with one’s own value system is not a virtue. It is, in the only true sense of the word, the very definition of a sin.

A pox upon them.

I mean that literally.

Oh — and one more thing. If anyone wants to draw the obvious connection to the current health care debates (Joe Stupak, are you listening? Senators?) then I think that is an entirely appropriate link. The entire anti-health care movement is in the end a decision to allow innocents to die in large numbers in order to achieve other ends; it sacrifices individuals in the service of either or both abstract “values” and the financial interests of various elites. Mere sin hardly covers the case; evil is more like it.

I simply couldn’t agree more. In the context of abortion the entire thing is rendered even more sickening because the anti-abortion people prefer imaginary, hypothetical, cute babies to the messy reality of adult women. And this is what informs each and every one of their health care decisions–they prefer the idea of the pure child over the messy reality of the living child too.

I don’t get it–not even in a religious sense. Sure, maybe its nice to have a moral girl, even if by that we mean she’s asexual. But theologically speaking the god of Mary Magdalene clearly preferred a newly moral follower to a dead prostitute. The first law of Christian conversion (except among the Mormons!) is that you have to be alive to experience it. Creating a situation in which the individual suffers and dies prematurely, especially if that happens because of religious bigotry, seems to militate against such a coming to jesus.

aimai

While encouraging the use of the HPV vaccine is absolutely a worthwhile endeavor, I feel like it should be noted that Rick Perry’s support of it in 2007 was somewhat questionably motivated (financial ties with Merck). However, those ties alone don’t make him wrong, of course. HPV *is*, indirectly, a cancer vaccine; cancer is something we would all like to see less of; the vaccine is safe and effective. These things add up to “use the damn vaccine.”

My other thought is that the already-tired “We shouldn’t give the vaccine to our innocent little girls because it’s like encouraging them to have sex” argument barely ruffles my feathers anymore, because I sincerely doubt the majority of the people who use it actually believe it. In my opinion, it’s likely just a symptom of the larger problem: to wit, there are a whole bunch of anti-vax loons out there who are essentially encouraging involuntary manslaughter a la Jenny McCarthy. If the “Oh no, our kids will have sex!” argument weren’t so readily available, they’d just come up with something else to argue against using the HPV vaccine (see: thimerosal, “toxins”, “too many too soon”, and other such absurd tripe). Which isn’t to say that these arguments as a whole aren’t infuriating, but this one in particular doesn’t bother me very much.

Also, pretty much anything David Brooks says is discounted as a matter of course these days on my part. But it is kind of fun to take apart his work.