There's a lot of discussion going on over at the South Dakota War College (and several of the SD blogs) about Governor Rounds' plan to give free (free at the taxpayers expense) HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) vaccinations to the girls of South Dakota.
For those who may not be familiar with HPV, it's a sexually transmitted disease that already infects about 20 million people, and can cause cervical cancer.
Conservatives don't like the idea of this vaccination because they fear it will promote promiscuity by short-circuiting one of the natural consequences of sex outside of marriage. Liberals (predictably) ballyhoo conservatives as mean and wanting to sexually oppress women.
This debate is similar to the one about AIDS and AIDS research. Why do we need to spend billions on a disease that can be eradicated by simply ACTING MORALLY? If you don't do drugs and don't have sex outside of marriage, AIDS would go away pretty quick. And, gee, moral restraint doesn't cost a dime. But no, I guess it's worth billions of dollars to us to be able to screw whatever we want whenever we want and in whatever way we want, huh?
Besides, it doesn't even protect against all strains of HPV. And it doesn't protect against many other STDs such as chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, or AIDS. It therefore stands a high likelihood of instilling a false sense of security which may result in greater suffering from those STDs that promiscuous people remain vulnerable to.
One of the comments somewhere on one of the blogs makes, I think, the best point of all. If you want to come up with a vaccine which will do what simple discipline will accomplish for free, then have at it. But should the taxpayers pay for it? I don't think so.
If you do think so, then why not have the state pay for every vaccination--after all, most diseases (mumps, measles, etc.) don't require immoral behavior to get them. So the case for taxpayer funding for these diseases is even greater. Of course, socialists out there would LOVE that idea anyway, because they believe the government should do everything for people, alleviating them from the responsibility of doing anything for themselves or paying for anything themselves, or even thinking for themselves. But I'm not one of them.
If you plan on not teaching your daughter to be sexually responsible and wait until marriage, and if you plan on not instilling the kind of values in her that will prompt her to seek a husband of like values, then go ahead and take the lazy way, ignore responsibility, and just send the taxpayers the bill.
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Friday, January 12, 2007
Stiffing the Taxpayers for What We Should Accomplish On Our Own
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