I found this post from Ginny extremely refreshing (even though my mind is still a bit hazy from the lack of sleep).

Conservatives hate their daughters.
Warning: policital incorrectness ahead. Cover your eyes if you can’t handle a personal opinion. As you read this, remember that I have two daughters (aged 23 and 15). I speak not as a liberal; I speak as a mother of 2 girls.

Additionally, I preface my thoughts with this fact:

Each year in the U.S.A. 14,500 new patients get invasive cervical cancer and 8,000 women die of it. “Pre-cancerous” changes in the cervix are much more common; they affect 59,000 American women per year and are shown by an abnormal “Pap smear”. Some, but not all, of these patients with “pre-cancerous” cervical changes will go on to develop frank cervical cancer. The average age of patients is 50 years, but the disease has been seen in patients ranging in age from 17 to 90 years. In general, cervical cancer has been on the increase in the United States, and even more in developing countries. It currently ranks as the fifth most common cancer in women, after lung, breast, colon and uterine cancer.

Governor Perry of Texas signed a mandate that schoolgirls must be vaccinated against cervical cancer, sidestepping opposition in the state Legislature. Texas is screaming that it’s because the governor is in bed with Merck, they claim that there hasn’t been enough testing, they claim that once vaccinated, girls would be less likely to go get pap smears…but their biggest problem with the vaccine is that getting vaccinated against cervical cancer will make their daughters more promiscuous.

Are you kidding me?

If this was a vaccine against prostate cancer or erectile dysfunction, you can bet the farm that these same parents would be lining their boys up, clamoring for the vaccine. If this were a vaccine against any other kind of cancer, parents would be lining their kids up for the vaccine. Because, however, this is a vaccine that protects their female children against a kind of cancer that is triggered by sexual contact, surely it’s an evil idea forwarded by those evil liberals who are against family values.

These are the same folks who teach their children abstinence as a form of birth control (which has driven up the incidence of oral and anal sex and STDs among teenagers) and who want to teach their kids that the world is 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs coexisted with Man. Normally, I would cluck and say that these folks deserve what they get with their misguided leanings…but we’re talking about potentially saving the lives of their own daughters. We’re talking about children who could potentially be spared heartache, surgery, chemotherapy and untimely death. We’re talking about a potential windfall of savings in insurance payouts, healthcare costs and taxpayer dollars as less women need assistance in paying for cancer treatments.

The fact that these folks have formulated the idea that vaccinated girls=promiscuous girls boggles my mind. If you’re that worried, don’t tell the girls what the shot is for! (But more importantly why are you that worried about your child’s sex life? No matter what you think your kid is doing, eventually he or she is going to be playing spin the bottle with some sweaty, airheaded brat and the best you can hope for is that you’ve taught your child well enough and are open enough for your kid that he or she will talk to you before that happens.)

Womens’ health is a touchy topic. The number 1 killer of women is heart attack, yet we pay more attention to and have more passion for the breast cancer cause. This is because a missing breast is more traumatic to a woman than a faulty heart valve; you can see a missing breast, but you can still look fabulous in your dress for your man no matter how bad your ticker is. The need to look sexy trumps the need to stay alive. On the opposite end of the spectrum, although the need for a woman to look sexy is paramount in the minds of both men and women, the need to keep the sexual organs functioning is taboo if it is your daughter’s sexual organs we’re talking about. It’s better for them to get cancer and die than it is for them to be protected because if they’re protected…they might have sex. Death before sex, then, for the daughters of Texas, if the Texas Legislature had their way.

Everyone is perpetually up in arms about how conservative Muslims treat women. At least conservative Muslims are out in the open with their misogynism–they cover their women in burqas. Conservative Americans would rather cover their women in caskets after a shortened lifetime of looking fabulous.