Liberal house leader Laurie Blakeman struggles to understand sex health issues
August 11, 2008 · By Charles Anthony
Clearly, Laurie Blakeman has trouble understanding that throwing money at problems does not solve them:
“How could we, in the third millennium, be dealing with the levels of syphilis that are out there in this province with this amount of money?” she asked.“This province doesn’t know what to do with health so they keep shifting everything around hoping it will all work and this time out, I think they’ve impaired the ability of the public-health section to do their job.”
What job might that be? The job of telling people to wear condoms? telling them again and again and again? Most people already know. Not a very complicated sex-ed lesson.
Old-fashioned conservatives and religious-folk are often characterized as proponents of abstinence education and usually they are. They are ridiculed as being the cause of failed sexual health programs. I suppose we
On the other hand, socialists have trouble accepting the free-will of mankind. They have trouble accepting the possibility that people are choosing to have the type of sex they are having. Given that most sexually transmitted diseases are transmitted by sexual contact (surprise!) and given that most preventive measures are cheap or readily available, it would seem preposterous to think that money is an issue. However, Laurie Blakeman looks at the money.
It certainly is distressing to hear about children dying of congenital syphilis but none of it surprises me. Just look at the math. Half of them are the children of prostitutes. Since it takes a minimum of two people to have sex, that means the other half are bringing it home. Ultimately, what it all boils down to is this: people are choosing to have sloppy and promiscuous sex. Now, look at the biology:
Musto says all women who attend pre-natal care are screened for syphilis but it’s almost inevitable that with a high rate of sexually transmitted infection, some pregnant women will slip through the cracks.
Antibiotics can be administered to pregnant women suffering from syphilis but may not stave off the disease’s effects on a fetus.
It seems like it is biologically impossible to prevent all congenital cases of syphillis.
I do not want to see any children suffering due to their parent’s irresponsibility but, unlike the deluded socialists, I do not think there is any education campaign that can eradicate the problem. Maybe we should all be grateful that nobody is proposing any neurotic interventions as the statesmen are doing in Africa.
“It certainly is distressing to hear about children dying of congenital syphilis but none of it surprises me. Just look at the math. Half of them are the children of prostitutes. Since it takes a minimum of two people to have sex, that means the other half are bringing it home. Ultimately, what it all boils down to is this: people are choosing to have sloppy and promiscuous sex.”
I’m not sure that this is entirely true. It’s perfectly possible for syphilis to exist within the body in a latent form for years without any evidence of infection, save blood tests, and it’s perfectly possible that a person may either be unaware that they have this form, or to cotract it from a partner who has this form. Now from the way you’re writing, it sounds a little like you’re not aware of this. Many people aren’t, and I can see how an education drive might be useful in this respect.
Good piece. As for the exceptions C mentioned, there will always be exceptions. How does that invalidate that Charles said?
Shane,
Those exceptions mean that more money has to be poured into education programs. It sounds a little like you are not aware of how the Liberal mind works when tackling social issues.
Telling people to wear condoms and to get themselves tested periodically to prevent the contraction and spread of STDs is not enough. You have to tell people to wear condoms and to get themselves tested periodically to prevent the spread and contraction of STDs because some STDs can be latent and carriers can be unaware like as if they were vulnerable to the only diseases in the entire history of mankind that have a latency period.
That extra little bit of information is what people need to know to convince them that AIDS, gonorrhea, herpes, chlamydia, lice, hepatitis, warts, malaria, cholera, leprosy, etc. are not bad enough — they have to prevent syphilis too!
Charles, are you really suggesting it’s wrong to suggest people get tested for STDs because “some STDs can be latent and carriers can be unaware”? That is the point that you’ve emphasised.
I would have thought that encouraging testing because of that was entirely sensible. You also make the point that STDs are not the only diseases to have latency periods. Rest assured, I am not suggesting that it would be wise to get regularly tested for typhoid if there has been no known contact with the infection.
C,
No, I am not suggesting that it is wrong to suggest people get tested for STDs. I am suggesting that it is foolhardy to assume that more money has to be spent telling people again and again and again and again and again.
Are you suggesting that people do not already know?
I’m suggesting that if you were to ask a reasonable sample of the population which STDs had latent forms, how long those latent periods lasted for, and which diseases could be prevented by condom use, and which ones couln’t you’d get a fair proportion of the population giving the wrong answers. In that sense, yes, I’m suggesting that people don’t already know.
You’re complaining that’s it’s wrong to repeatedly tell people about STDs, and yet you’re prefectly happy to explain again and again and again that the guiding hand of the market will take care of everything on a large proportion of your blog entries. As you think that the population is smart enough to have got the message about STDs by now, I can only assume that you view your readership as idiots.
The latency of STDs does not change what precautions must be taken. To put it a different way, ask yourself this: after wearing a condom and getting tested routinely, what more should you do after learning that some diseases have a latency period? ANSWER: Nothing. There is nothing more that you could be doing — apart from refraining from nasty behavior.
The latency of syphillis is irrelevent to the proposed intervention.
I am not assuming people are idiots, I am saying they CHOOSE to take risks knowing well that they are putting themselves and others in danger.
Like I said in my original post, socialists have trouble accepting the free-will of man.
“The latency of STDs does not change what precautions must be taken. To put it a different way, ask yourself this: after wearing a condom and getting tested routinely, what more should you do after learning that some diseases have a latency period? ANSWER: Nothing.
The latency of syphillis is irrelevent to the proposed intervention.”
I’m saying that if someone appears to have been healthy for years with no symptoms, it’s possible that they might wrongly think that they can’t be suffering from syphilis, and in turn, not bother getting tested, and not use any form of protection.
Oh, and as for free will, I think you’re confusing socialists with determinists. There’d be no point in trying to educate people if they were already predetermined to take risks knowing that they’d be putting themselves and other in danger.
Three years later, it turns out I was right. There are usually two arguments for why government should spend money: social justice and economic. This issue had both arguments going for it. Social/Justice because society is responsible for protecting and caring for the most vulnerable, even if they are ‘children of prostitutes’ as you say above. And economically, it costs society, the business community and or the government in productivity, additional social programs and often the involvement of other government agencies like police, ambulance, hospitals etc. Bottom line, its costing tax payers more money. So in cases like this, yes, the government should spend money to educate. Cheers!
laurie
No, Laurie, you are not right about anything. People already know that they should be wearing condoms as they did two years ago. You are spending money on nothing.
You really do not know what you are talking about. You really can not recognize that some people refuse to wear condoms. I do not know what to say to that. Wow.
I yearn for the invention of the time machine, if only so that libertarian/conservatives who believe society is helpless in the face of raw human nature can be sent back to era in which busy-body governments didn’t make any effort to educate or ameliorate.
Large, bureaucratic systems don’t make much a dent on behavior in the short term, but the goal posts do get moved, because our collective EXPECTATIONS change. Progress is not inevitable, but it does happen. Anyone who says it doesn’t is merely blinded by ideology.
If you need a government to tell you to put on a condom whenever you have slutty sex, congratulations! That is progress!
“Slutty sex”? I see you’ve invented that time machine already, and have used it to transport your worldview back to the 1950s.
Government messaging, on its own, doesn’t do much, but it helps create an atmosphere in which progress is possible. Symbolism counts, and education has longterm benefits. This isn’t hard to figure out, unless you are so wedded to an ideology in which everything a government does is, ipso facto, wasteful and pointless and freedom-restricting.
If government messaging were pointless, then why do they all spend millions of dollars massaging every word and stage-managing every photo op?
By extension, you are saying that advertising has no effect on human behavior. An interesting notion I sometimes wish were true.
Much better to look at governments like dogs: a dumb beast that can do very useful things, very silly and messy things, and very harmful things, depending on who is holding the leash.
Charles,
Did I misunderstand you about 2 years about when you said you were a sex therapist?
Can anyone tell me why, three years on, Ms. Blakeman has (apparently) appeared to tell us all that she was right? Did some new information come to light?
Also, what exactly was she right about?
And these are honest questions, I’ve been busy these days and I know I’ve missed a few news stories. I’m just wondering what I missed on this one.
RD, are you talking about this post?
I thought Charles was just being cheeky, but I could be wrong.
Damn HTML error.
Like Jonathan, I too am curious as to why Ms Blakeman thinks she’s been proven right. But I am even more curious as to why Charles thinks she’s wrong, since the only argument he has made so far is that people already “know” they should use condoms, so if they don’t, fuck ‘em (or, er, don’t fuck ‘em) – there’s nothing anyone can do, anyhow.
Jonathan,
I have no idea when Charles is being cheeky or not. Rarely do his posts make much sense to me to be honest and his views can be so extreme I usually wish he were joking. I can at least be thankful that he writes an anti-war post occasionally.