HomoQuotable – Dan Savage

“Religious conservatives loved the HPV virus because it killed women. Here was a potentially fatal STI that condoms couldn’t protect you from. Abstinence educators pointed to HPV and jumped up and down—they loved to overstate HPV’s seriousness and its deadliness—in their efforts to scare kids into saving themselves for marriage. And they fought the introduction of the HPV vaccine tooth-and-nail because vaccinating women against HPV would ‘undermine’ the abstinence message. Given a choice between your wife, daughter, sister, or mom dying of cervical cancer or no longer being to scream ‘HPV IS GOING TO KILL YOU!’ at classrooms full of terrified teenagers, socially conservative abstinence ‘educators’ preferred the former.” – Dan Savage, writing for Slog.