Over the next few posts, you will make the acquaintance of a number of facts, each with links to more information. Some of them are educational, presented in hopes of correcting popular misconceptions. Some of them are ugly–very ugly–presented in hopes that bringing them to the attention of more people will raise the chances that something will be done. Sometimes all a blogger can do is blog, y’know? And isn’t that what the Internet is for?

So. Spreading the word. Here are some words.

Support the HPV vaccine: (Salon article, via.) You’d think most people would be in favor of preventing “70 percent of cervical cancers from developing” and possibly taking lives. But just as AIDS was seen for years as just punishment for that wicked, wicked homosexuality, many see HPV as something women only get if they’re insufficiently chaste (and therefore deserve cancer, the sluts).

Unpacking all the wrongness in that attitude: there’s the idea that female sex should be punished by terminal illness, the idea that HPV is solely a women’s disease, the idea that HPV only affects “loose women”… Listen. If a woman remains a virgin right up to marriage, she can still contract HPV on her wedding night if her husband’s ex-wife, also a virgin until the wedding, was raped the night after their second anniversary by some guy carrying HPV.

In any case, my point here is: Here is a medical advance that will diminish suffering. But there is a strong faction of Americans who want it never to reach the open market, much less be included in the bouquet of vaccines all children get before starting school. It’s not that I think you don’t know about ‘em, of course, you probably do–but you may not know that we can’t afford to just sit here rolling our eyes at their women-hating, sex-phobic psychosis. Their psychosis has political influence. We desperately need to counter it.

Write your congress-critters, y’all.