HPV Vaccine Opponents Put Men At Risk Too

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 2:37 PM on May 13, 2008.

PZ reports that researchers have discovered a link between HPV and oral cancers in men, justifying another look at vaccinating young men for HPV (which also improves herd immunity). So now, as PZ notes, the religious right is facing a major dilemma. It’s one thing to tolerate thousands of deaths from cervical cancer, which only affects women, in order to show that the wages of sin are death. But the sin of fornication is a much different thing for men and women—which is why the nuts say that a woman who has sex is impure and contaminated, but a man who does has just let his integrity slip a little, which is something you can get back by giving your bus seat up to a few old ladies. Certainly, we don’t need straight men getting physically contaminated for real to show that sex is contaminating, when the only spiritually contaminated party is the woman. That’s why, after all, it’s not a sign of integrity for a man to have sex with a woman before marriage, because you’re fouling up someone else’s virgin.

Anyway, PZ has a question.

Now the religious right is going to face a dilemma. Shall they encourage this vaccination to protect their precious boy-children, or will it be sufficient to scream against the sin of heterosexual oral sex from the pulpit? And can they even bear to talk about such ‘bizarre’ sexual practices in church?

Being a long-time wingnut watcher, I propose that their response to the dilemma will largely be to pretend it doesn’t exist. Inconvenient facts aren’t grappled with in the anti-choice world. If it doesn’t fit their arguments, they push it aside 99.9% of the time. No matter how many times it’s pointed out to anti-choicers that late term abortions are performed for health and safety reasons, and not just as a fad diet plan or whatever they think it is that women are doing, they simply don’t acknowledge it. We’re talking people who bald-faced tell girls that having a baby at 15 is no big deal, something you can walk off with a sensible diet and exercise plan. (See this week’s podcast for a jaw-dropping example.) Apparently, as long as you pretend it’s not real, it’s not. Sadly, the constructed reality model is working out pretty well for them, as evidenced by the government support for their fantasies over the evidence-based, reality-honoring arguments.

Anyway, cunnilingus is so gay. Why on earth would a warm-blooded heterosexual Christian man want to put his mouth on the penis sleeve, if not because he secretly likes to taste cock salt? Oral cancer is a sign that someone was homosexing up the sacred heterosexual bedroom, and so preventing it would be thwarting god’s homophobic will.

Tagged as: choice, cancer, hpv