Sex, Sensibility, & Science
This is cool. Most everyone knows that I'm a scientist of some sort — at least I am when I can hold down a paying job. Also, most everyone knows that I'm secretly a pornographer, although it's hardly a big secret given the link to Jay Neal's website that you can see at the top and on the right.
So, like how often do "science" and "sex" get mentioned at the same time? By Susie Bright* no less!
Our Onward-Christian-Bullshitter administration is on a crusade to crush sex, sensibility, and science. They don't separate one from the other.
[Susie Bright, "I Want to Be Disinhibited– Whether W. Likes It or Not", The Huffington Post, 14 April 2006.]
The article, by the way, is about the efforts by religious extremists to suppress the newly developed HPV vaccine because they believe it might lead to sex. It's a good piece.
While on that subject, she quotes David Baltimore as saying "I never thought that now, in the twenty-first century, we could have a debate about what to do with a vaccine that prevents cancer." Quoting him further
We are talking about basic public health now. What moral precepts allow us to think that the risk of death is a price worth paying to encourage abstinence as the only approach to sex?
Exactly so.
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*Unfortunately, it is not true that all pornographers know each other, even though it's a smallish world, so — alas — I don't know Susie Bright. Not yet, at least.
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To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Saturday, 15 April 2006 at 02.33
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I continue to be amazed and appalled that these efforts are effectively being ignored by the mainstream media. If the shoe was on the other foot somehow, Fox News and the rest of the right-wing noise machine would be all over it. The moral outrage they'd express would be something to behold.
On a related note, over about the past 20-25 years, a reactionary movement of crackpots opposed to childhood immunizations has grown up in this country. I think most of the people in it are neurotics with an anti-government, "they're my kids and you can't make me take them in for their shots" attitude.
These people have all sorts of reasons. They seem convinced the incidence of adverse reactions is much higher than the approximately 0.5 percent to less than 1.5 percent officially cited, depending on the brew. They're sure the thimerosol often used as a preservative is going to poison their kids.
These anti-immunization people periodically get on a kick of writing letters to the local newspaper, which dutifully publishes their rants. The newspaper's position is that its mission is to provide exposure to the widest possible range of views on all sorts of topics.
I appreciate that, but have protested that when a subject is based on science, opinions spouted by the uninformed or ill informed don't deserve any space, much less equal space, with accurate information.
If the din gets bad enough, a doctor or nurse may write the paper stating the facts. Those letters often trigger a follow-up from the anti-immunization folks, to the effect that of course doctors and nurses will defend giving the shots; it's their business, after all.
And so it goes.
The anti-fluoridation partisans rampage along a parallel path. Having lived nearly all my life in places where the water was fluoridated with wild abandon, my bones should be hard as petrified wood and as brittle bran flakes, yet they're holding up nicely even after all these decades. My teeth haven't turned the color of Kentucky Fried Chicken and started cracking and falling out, either. Maybe I'm idiosyncratically immune to all the bad side effects.
What's more likely is that they don't know what they're talking about.