The Christian Right Wants You to Get Herpes

That's an exaggeration; however, it reinforces the idea that the Christian right in this country wants to control the sexuality of their children (an the sexuality of your children) through fear. Merck is just about ready to release the drug Gardasil, which would block four strains of HPV and also help in preventing cervical cancer (this from reuters.com).

The drug giant wants the vaccine to be mandatory for students (remember when you had to take that tetanus boster shot just before college?). Obviously this would be great for the company, since it would be an automatic market for their product. To be fair, the Christian right is not saying that the vaccine should be banned, but parents should be allowed to opt out (like certain vaccines are "strongly recommended" but not mandatory, like Hepatitis A) if they so choose. The argument for this is that a vaccine against a disease (Herpes) which is exclusively sexually transmitted will give their children a false sense of security and cause promiscuity. I hate to say it, but this is another instance of parents making the establishment do the parenting for them. If you want to keep your kid vulnerable to sexually transmitted disease in order to scare him or her out of having sex, then I would suggest you also go about banning condoms from drugstores since they also "promote promiscuity" by protecting people from sexually transmitted diseases and, gasp, unwanted pregnancies.

If the vaccine is safe I really see no moral conflict in protecting oneself from herpes. If, god forbid, one were raped (and I can guarantee that the perpetrator is probably not really thinking about safety) the victim would be protected from at least one sexually transmitted disease. This is an instance where the sexual act was not done out of the vaccine's recipient's promiscuity.

Although I see nothing really controversial about being able to opt out of a vaccine, the argument for it is narrow-minded. If I were a parent I would be all for sending my child off to college with something more to protect her (and she would also have the added benefit of lowering her risk of cervical cancer to boot). When children are out of their nest, parents need to trust that they learned the lessons and values of their families, and scaring them into not making a big personal decision I feel is irresponsible and, perhaps most significantly, unfair.