Can anyone explain this?

Social conservatives are arguing a new vaccine against the sexually transmitted human papilloma virus — which causes cervical cancer in about 10,000 women per year, killing 3,700 — should not be mandatory, because it sends the message that it’s OK to have sex.

We know that, by preventing the mandatory inoculations, more people will die. Yet these same social conservatives describe themselves as “pro-life”?

This makes no sense.

Social conservatives dislike abortion, but they oppose distributing condoms and the education encouraging kids to use them, even though doing so would radically reduce the spread of disease, unwanted pregnancies and, by extension, abortion.

This makes no sense.

The very same social conservatives who dislike abortion support a pharmacists’ right to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions on moral or religious grounds. It’s the same thing as saying a gas station attendant who has moral or religious qualms with fossil fuel burning can decline to fill gas tanks, yet keep his job.

This makes no sense whatsoever.

Now, if this were simply an academic exercise, it would be mildly interesting. But it’s not; the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is struggling to endorse a mandatory human papilloma virus vaccine (that’s very effective at preventing cervical cancer) because of the objections of social conservatives. And why? Because social conservatives clearly have the ear of the president. (Just ask Harriet Miers.)

“What the Bush administration has done has taken this coterie of people and put them into very influential positions in Washington. And it’s having an effect in debates like this,” Brown University political science professor James Morone Jr. said in a story published in today’s Review-Journal.

Social conservatives have every right to speak out and make their views known. They have the right to raise their children as they see fit. But when they stand in the way of an inoculation that could save lives, they become dangerous, and must be stopped.

Now that makes sense.