I Need a Courtland Translator

Heard the news about one in four adolescent women having a sexually transmitted disease? It's a truly horrible situation. But a horrible situation doesn't excuse Washington Post writer Courtland Milloy to write a fever dream of a column. I just can't make sense of it.

The relative lack of attention to men's sexual health has consequences, too. The March issue of the Journal of Pediatrics reports on a study that found that circumcision does not necessarily reduce the risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. Why is it taking us so long to deal with these questions? And given that flash of Stone Age insight, should we be surprised if some guy out there still thinks that smashing his penis with a rock will get rid of gonorrhea?

What!? What does that mean!? Milloy is being so obtuse and confusing that it's making it hard for me to attack his silly words.

I'm going to assume that Milloy think it's obvious that circumcision doesn't reduce the risk of contracting an STD. If that's the case, then Milloy hasn't been paying attention.

And if people are smashing their penises with rocks, then, yes, I would be quite surprised.

According to the Annals of Internal Medicine for April 1, almost one in four U.S. women who undergo cervical screening are found to have the high-risk human papillomavirus. HPV is a leading cause of deadly cervical cancer.

Yet there was virtually no public outcry about HPV until a pharmaceutical company came up with an HPV vaccine. All of a sudden, the health of girls is so important that some states have made vaccination a condition of their admission to public school.

The health of girls became so suddenly important because people realized how widespread the problem is. I still don't understand what Milloy is missing.

By the way, the plural "states" is wrong. Only one state has made the HPV vaccine mandatory. That would be Virginia. Washington, DC, which is not a state, passed a similar law. Milloy was against mandatory HPV vaccinations on, wait for it, racial grounds. Check it out here. Here's a particularly nasty excerpt:

Only the most progressive and caring elected city officials -- in this case, two nice white people -- would propose a program to vaccinate against sexually transmitted disease girls under 13 in a predominantly black school system.

And from the CNN page I linked to above:

A virus that causes cervical cancer is by far the most common sexually transmitted infection in teen girls aged 14 to 19, while the highest overall prevalence is among black girls -- nearly half the blacks studied had at least one STD.

Emphasis mine. And Milloy had the nerve to say the vaccinations were a way for whites to control blacks. The easy counter-argument is that the city has a pretty reasonable desire to not have its hospitals filled with cervical cancer patients. Black women are an especially at risk group and DC has tons of black women. It's Chocolate City for Christ's sake. Yet Milloy continues - in a column about HPV being so widespread! - to be suspicious of why people want girls to get vaccinated.

If someone could present Milloy's reasoning in a more understandable way than Milloy himself, I would greatly appreciate it.

It's enough to make you wonder why schools don't do a better job of sex education. You already know why parents can't do the job. Half of the kids most at risk don't have any parents to speak of, and the other half have parents too busy to try.

That's a pretty crazy racial generalization. A year ago Milloy was defending black students from their white Council overlords. Now he's saying that black people, those most at risk, are incapable of raising their own children.

Milloy then goes on to advocate for more comprehensive sexual education. No complaint here. My complaint is with The Post giving this hack copy space. I don't think Milloy understands his own views any better than I do. And he certainly doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.