That Movie With Gwyneth Paltrow's Head in A Box...

I loved "Se7en" (and for that matter pretty much anything David Fincher has done. "Se7en", "The Game", "Panic Room" and last, but certainly not least, "Fight Club". Let's chalk the Madonna videos and "Alien3" up to youthful inexperience...), but turning national pharmecutical policy into a vehicle for punishing 'sinners' is a little closer to John Doe's (Kevin Spacey's character) vision then we realy want to go right?

I mean, curing a disease which causes cervical cancer is a good thing right? Well:

[n]ot so fast, say some social and religious conservatives. For instance, Dr. Hal Wallis, head of the abstinence only sex education group the Physicians Consortium is worried that the vaccine might encourage people, especially unmarried teenagers, to be more promiscuous. "We're going to be sending a message to a lot of kids, I think, that you just take this shot and you can be as sexually promiscuous as you want and it's not going to be a problem, and that's just not true," said Dr. Wallis to the conservative religious group Focus on the Family.

(Query, whither the similar outrage from the Right Reverend Hal over Viagra/Cialis, etc., Rogaine and other items which promote male sexuality? Is he positing that only married people should be able to get hard or grow hair once they hit fifty? Well, I still have more then 20 years I suppose...)

The question is begged, if we don't want drugs to help the lustful, what about the next step down the slippery slope:

[T]he FDA should tell the medical profession and the public that it will not approve any medications that would help fight obesity. Any drug that allows people to eat their cakes and stay model slim clearly encourages gluttony.

Lasik is bad because if people can't really see, they won't be envious. And clearly, the internet should be banned because things such as blogging only encourage sinful pride...

So we now have a 'leading' Presidential bioethicist who longs for the good ole days of arranged marriage and explicit inequality of the sexes, (for some world class snark on Kass, see Crooked Timber, Classical Values [plus list of links] or especially World O'Crap) with a drug policy of about the same scientific sophistication.

(Query #2, how does letting people die of cervical cancer jibe with Pro-Life ideology? What, is asking for consistency too much...NM, don't answer...)