– Galileo, at his Papal trial
How ass-backwards are these people! Only Magritte’s La Reproduction Interdit (right) can capture the twisted logic that now dominates the Bush Administration’s “management” of science. You’d have to go back to the time of Galileo to find so much religious meddling and censorship.
According to an article in the current New Yorker, politically connected fundamentalists are prepared to wage the same war on an H.I.V. vaccine that they are waging on stem cell research, evolution, and, more pointedly, a critical vaccine against the Human Papilloma virus or HPV.
A vaccine exists against the HPV virus that would dramatically reduce the number of cervical cancer cases. The religious right opposes it as a mandatory childhood vaccination. Why? Because cervical cancer serves as a powerful “disincentive” to premarital sex. And in their malignant, Apocalypse-centric view of things, human misery is preferable to sin — especially the human misery of the “Other”, the non-Born-Again non-Christian.
Michael Specter reports in the New Yorker:
Religious conservatives are unapologetic; not only do they believe that mass use of an HPV vaccine, or the availability of emergency contraception, will encourage adolescents to engage in unacceptable sexual behavior; some have even stated that they would feel similarly about an H.I.V. vaccine, if one became available.
“We would have to look at that closely,” Reginald Finger, an evangelical Christian and a former medical adviser to the conservative political organization Focus on the Family, said. “With any vaccine for H.I.V., disinhibition” — a medical term for the absence of fear — “would certainly be a factor, and it is something we will have to pay attention to with a great deal of care.”
Finger sits on the Centers for Disease Control’s Immunization Committee, which makes those recommendations.
In an online Q & A with the author, the New Yorker was perplexed by the Bush Administration’s “hostility” to science.
Michael Specter: I’m not sure I would use the word hostility. The Administration simply doesn’t seem to rely on the advice of scientists on a wide range of issues: climate change, pollution, and biomedical research, for example. Previous Administrations have taken science as an area that is above the political fray — this one does not seem to operate that way.
New Yorker: The opposition to science seems to have a number of strains, many religious. You write about how the Administration is vehemently opposed to “any drug, vaccine, or initiative that could be interpreted as lessening the risks associated with premarital sex.” Do policymakers have some other rationale, or is this more of a straightforward agenda?
Michael Specter: Well, the Bush Administration is squarely on the record in favor of abstinence as the main approach to issues such as H.I.V. and abortion. Few groups, by the way, oppose abstinence as an approach, and many see it as an excellent first line of defense. Unfortunately, however, it doesn’t always work, and, when it does, it rarely works for long. Nonetheless, the Administration — and many of its allies among conservatives and the religious right — places far more emphasis on abstinence than on teaching children other methods of birth control and protection against sexually transmitted diseases.
“It’s not so easy to disentangle the Administration and the Christian right,” Specter later observed. “The President is an evangelical Christian and so are many people in his Administration. On many issues, though, industrial lobbyists hold sway.”
Would somebody please impeach this jerk!
Appearantly these Christians have forgotten all about life, and focused on what they think God wants hem to do. Hello? There is a REAL world you live in! They just can’t get enough of destroying everything that they can’t use, or their evil view on the Bible doesn’t support. “Ahr, brother Bill! Have ye heard of them new HIV medicjine? Well, wea doon need it, let’s find a way make it a sin or somethem, like we did on them cloning theing.”
Right. Now, I am a Christian, and am very certain God is not going to receive such evil in heaven. Life out of sin is no strickt requirement, just do it as little as possible, but live without evil is.
Derreck.
P.S.
Braindead Christians; Step out of the shadow of evil, which you claim to be the Good and pure, and walk in the light of day, for there you will find God, and all the Good in the world, YOU can be part of.
“Let ye who has not sinned, cast the first stone”….I fear for these people of the Religious Right, for they are not only in severe need of good shrinks, but I believe they are going to have some explaining to do when they meet their makers….nothing they say adds up or makes any sense…it is total nonsense….they spew forth hateful venom, and claim to be “christians”…there is no such thing as what they are in the real world….it is a pure and simple act of scapegoating homosexuals to make their self righteous claims, and place themselves up to a higher level, of which there is no such thing on this planet Earth, at least not the way it is explained in the Bible that they preach from….God is the final judge and jury, not people, and if homosexuality is “wrong”, then it isn’t even up to any soul on this earth to judge it…the Bible wants us to LOVE ALL OF GOD’S CHILDREN….again: “let ye who has not sinned, cast the first stone”….these so called “christians” are very creepy, and scary people….YIKES!!!!
These people are criminally insane and it’s time that we start treating them as such.
Alan, do you claim that ALL Christians are very creepy and scary, or just the creepy and scary ones?
Anyway, keep in mind that a “Christian” is someone who believes Christ was the Son of our good God. No religious binding is automatically included, the stereotype of the Christian is a Bible believer who seems to be hating the entire world, is so extreme that he/she finds him/her feeling greater than the rest of the world. At this point they have overgrown God.
Sins are strange things, we do ‘em always, ’till we die one day. And to God, all sin is equal, so why actively destroy gayness? Hatried against homosexuals is stupid. I think the destruction of lives, by any means and here the denial of HIV vaccin, is degrading to humanity, and Christianity in common.
Ideologies aside, I’d almost say that the HIV virus didn’t come from monkeys…well ‘12 monkeys” (ish) maybe.
Dont even get me started on superstition.
I’m sorry, this has nothing to do with the very important topic you discussed in this post, but on a sidenote, I think it’s so awesome that you used Magritte’s artwork. He is my inspiration.