Good lord I love Katha Pollitt. This column is about a week old, but check it out if you haven’t already. She writes about the religious right’s opposition to an HPV vaccine that could save the lives of thousands of women, and help prevent cervical cancer in even more.
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.
The whole column is so good that I’m fighting the urge to copy and paste the entire thing here just to make sure that it gets read… but I’ll leave you with this excerpt.
As they flex their political muscle, right-wing Christians increasingly reveal their condescending view of women as moral children who need to be kept in line sexually by fear. That’s why antichoicers will never answer the call of prochoicers to join them in reducing abortions by making birth control more widely available: They want it to be less available. Their real interest goes way beyond protecting fetuses–it’s in keeping sex tied to reproduction to keep women in their place. If preventing abortion was what they cared about, they’d be giving birth control and emergency contraception away on street corners instead of supporting pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions and hospitals that don’t tell rape victims about the existence of EC.
Via Classical Liberal Conservative