Because Republicans are idiots:
Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush’s evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US’s major public health body.
In a report that will surprise few of Bush’s critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.
The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs.
Not that there aren’t idiots in the Democratic Party, as well.
They won’t care.
It’s not that they’re heartless, though of course many of them are. It’s that the facts conflict with their beliefs. These are people who were raised within a religion that prizes absolute, unwavering belief above all other things. It doesn’t matter what the facts are; it’s the beliefs that are important. Facts don’t determine whether or not you go to Hell. Neither do your actions — faith, not works, and misdeeds can always be forgiven. What matters is what you believe. Period.
Strictly speaking, this only applies to matters touched on by religious doctrine. God is, after all, conspicuously silent on the relative virtues of Windows versus Mac. But the habit, deeply ingrained from childhood abuse — and what else does one call lying to a child and threatening them with a fate worse than their worst nightmares if they don’t believe the lie? — inevitably comes to encompass everything else. Ergo, if one of them comes to believe that Macs are better than Windows, or terrorism is the great challenge of our times, or that we must protect our children by failing to protect them, they will reflexively stand by that belief until the day they die. (Or at least until it ceases to be personally convenient, but that’s not unique to religious people.)
Belief, in the end, is a conscious refusal to update one’s picture of the world to accommodate new facts. The believer seals off his or her brain from the world and repeats the belief over and over again. Human brains are really, really good at mastering skills that are practiced often, and the skill of not thinking and not observing is hardly one of the more challenging ones. Human brains are also really, really good at applying skills learned in one area to every other area wherein they can be exercised at all. And given the many areas of similarity between god-worship and leader-worship, it is no surprise that people who suffer from belief syndrome are capable of being as rigidly doctrinaire in political matters as they are in religious matters. If one can reflexively reject science, all of the less rigorous and reliable areas of human knowledge — which is to say everything else — can be filtered out much, much more easily.
We now have the results of a complete experiment before us. What happens when children are properly educated about sex versus what happens when they are not? The religious right is fundamentally incapable of drawing the simple and obvious conclusion here. The ability to think rationally was never developed in most of them, and what survived their upbringing has only atrophied over time, as it does in all of us due to the aging process.
As a result, a large number of innocent people have acquired diseases, some of which are incurable, and a couple of which are terminal. Here, just as on the religious battlefields of the middle east, we are confronted once again with the incontrovertible fact that religious belief is not harmless. Whether we, as rational human beings, can see past our inherited belief in unrestricted religiosity to act on the facts of the matter is an open question. The wingnuts, obviously, cannot. Can we?
They have weaponized their ignorance.
Their ignorance has been weaponized since at least the the death of Hypatia. We’re just seeing their latest effort to dismantle the Age of Reason. Fortunately, they seem to be failing. Unfortunately, they’ll be back the next time our vigilance flags.
Our disadvantage is that rationality and knowledge are skills acquired through strenuous effort, but irrationality and ignorance are the birthright of every human. Each new generation occasions a massive struggle to encourage as many as possible to defect from their native state into rational civilization.
“The believer seals off his or her brain from the world and repeats the belief over and over again.”
“Denial” ain’t just a river in Egypt;-)
The United States should be planning for a possible second round of fiscal stimulus to further prop up the economy after the $787 billion rescue package launched in February, an adviser to President Barack Obama said. Wage restraint remains one of the main hopes for rectifying Britain’s budget deficit, despite opposition to a pay freeze from public sector unions. These days, almost anytime someone borrows to fund a business, buy a car or get a mortgage, the debt gets repackaged into a security that can be bought or sold like a stock. But critics say abuses in the securitization market helped bring about the housing meltdown. Consumerism and materialism have been the new religions in this country for years. The Making Home Affordable Modification program has a $75 billion commitment to support online cash loans modifications so that up to 3 to 4 million borrowers at risk of foreclosure can keep their homes.
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