Opinion Nuggets: The Gray Lady's Bobblehead

Gail Collins is right. The Perry/Bachmann kerfuffle over mandatory HPV shots is a major score for Bachman politically and a serious liability for Perry. But, as per usual, Collins completely misses the point as to why.

About the vaccine. It’s been proved to be effective in reducing cervical cancer in sexually active women, and it apparently works best if you begin the shots around age 12. The intense opposition from the social right appears to be based on the idea that once the kids had the shots they’d be more likely to have sex. Or, in the convoluted and creepy words of Rick Santorum: “Unless Texas has a very progressive way of communicating diseases in their school by way of their curriculum, then there is no government purpose served for having little girls inoculated at the force and compulsion of the government.”

Let’s start with the obvious: “About the vaccine” is not a sentence. Collins undisciplined attempts at conversational writing simply give the appearance of amateurish writing. This is no less worthy of derision than the aimless ramblings that follow, as it reflects both on her professionalism and on the sagging reputation of the Times’ opinion page.

On substance, just about every sentence in this paragraph fails to make the grade (except those quoted from Rick Santorum). The first sentence isn’t actually a sentence. The second looks like it’s copied and pasted straight from Wikipedia and/or Merck’s website.

The wheels really fall off in the third sentence. It starts inauspiciously when Collins misunderstands which factions object to Perry’s vaccine policies. She dismissively and mistakenly tabs the “social right” as Perry’s antagonists—a particularly odd claim given Perry’s bulletproof standing with devout conservative voters. At the debate, these were the smattering of folks that cheered wildly when he said that he would always err on the side of life. They were grossly outnumbered by Perry’s detractors, yet Collins flips the roles. This is, of course, because Collins fundamentally misunderstands that all conservatives object to Perry’s policy because a) it is a gross misuse of executive authority at the expense of the legislative process and b) whether passed by executive fiat or by legislative deliberation, it uses the bludgeon of government to dictate healthcare decisions. Conservatives do not object to this vaccine or to vaccines in general; we object to overreaching mandates. A failure to grasp these basic concepts leads Collins down the primrose path to babbling idiocy.  

By this time, Collins accusing Santorum—who was speaking in on live television instead of writing with an editor to parse every word—of convoluted and creepy language doesn't even meet the bar of a pot/kettle situation. It’s a pot/anything-not-black situation. What’s more, she omits—either intentionally or though massive incompetence—Santorum’s preface that the basis for school vaccines and inoculations is to prevent the incidental spread of communicable diseases through interactions associated with being at school. In other words, a child shouldn’t get Pertussis or Diphtheria just because their schoolwork requires that they work in close proximity to each other. The full quote from Santorum is:

“I believe your policy is wrong.  Why — ladies and gentlemen, why do we inoculate people with vaccines in public schools?  Because we’re afraid of those diseases being communicable between people at school. And therefore, to protect the rest of the people at school, we have vaccinations to protect those children.

Unless Texas has a very progressive way of communicating diseases in their school by way of their curriculum, then there is no government purpose served for having little girls inoculated at the force and compulsion of the government.  This is big government run amok.  It is bad policy, and it should not have been done.”

FULL DEBATE TRANSCRIPT (See page 3 for above quote)

Santorum’s point was simply that no mandate may justifiably cover sexually transmitted disease because no class or school-related work may justifiably require sex. In fact, he put this difficult to articulate idea quite succinctly. Far from being creepy or convoluted, his point was on-topic and a necessary reminder of exactly why conservatives favor some school vaccines and precisely where we draw the line.

Gail Collins, for her part, is off somewhere reading Jennifer Rubin’s blog post today about Republicans assault on intellectualism and smugly nodding along like a bobblehead.