When you go to woman ...

Today is Sunday, 11 June 2006.

The very good news: “Federal drug officials on Thursday announced the approval of a vaccine against cervical cancer that could eventually save thousands of lives each year in the United States and hundreds of thousands in the rest of the world.” (The New York Times)

The bad news: “But Gardasil’s price could put it out of reach for most women in poor countries and some in the United States who lack private insurance.” (Ibid.)

The worst news: certain “Christian” groups hope to prevent any government role in funding distribution of the vaccine. “We can prevent [cervical cancer] by the best public health method, and that’s not having sex before marriage,” said Linda Klepacki, a flack for Focus on the Family, the extremist political conspiracy. (Ibid.)

That is: better for women to die of cervical cancer, than to risk giving unmarried women the idea of premarital sex by giving a vaccine, even though the median age at which American women first have sex is 15.

In other words, premarital chastity is so important to the Focus god that it is willing to have women killed over it.

The same holds true for the whole range of demands that young people not be taught that scientific birth control methods reduce the chances of pregnancy and disease by ninety per cent or more. Death by HIV/AIDS is morally and theologically preferable to condom use.

And how do Focus on the Family, and its co-conspirators, know? Their god has told them, in ways most people can’t perceive, and ordered them to impose its will on all humanity. People have no right to make their own choices: the elect of god will dictate choices to them.

This is simply the latest front in patriarchal fascism’s war on women. That some women, like Ms. Klepacki above, or anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schlafly, choose to support this war, is evidence of the power of socialization to warp judgement, and of some women’s choice of avarice and advancement over humaneness and solidarity.

Were the warriors, male and female, for patriarchal fascism to study Nietzsche, I’m certain they would delight in his infamous maxim: “When you go to woman, take the whip.”
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BONUS

Phyllis Schlafly: “The flight from the home is a flight from yourself, from responsibility, from the nature of woman, in pursuit of false hopes and fading illusions" (from campusprogress.com, as are quotes below). This from a woman whose resume includes testing ammunition (St. Louis Ordnance Plant), B.A. Washington Univ., M.A. Harvard, J.D., Washington, founding Eagle Forum, Congressional candidate (1952), etc.

This is on a par with fundamentalist women who proclaim that the New Testament demands women be silent in church, then proceed to run profitable ministry businesses where they talk up a storm.

Schlafly quotes:

"Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions."

"Just tell them to keep your hands out of what’s inside your swimsuits – that takes care of most girls and boys."

"It’s very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or sterility, or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or brain-damaged baby (even 10 years later when she may be happily married)."

"The atomic bomb is a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God."

“Many years ago Christian pioneers had to fight savage Indians. Today missionaries of these former cultures are being sent via the public schools to heathenize our children.”

“I suspect that the picture of the woman soldier with a noose around the Iraqi man’s neck will soon show up on the bulletin boards of women’s studies centers and feminist college professors. That picture is the radical feminists’ ultimate fantasy of how they dream of treating men.”