Let freedom fester

IN THE wake of a measles outbreak that started in Disneyland over the holidays, many Republicans are bravely standing up for every child's right to polio, smallpox and other diseases that are easily preventable with a vaccine.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie kicked off the controversy when he declared that "parents need to have some measure of choice" about vaccinations, and added that "not every disease type is as great a public health threat as others."

Christie's "everybody just chill" vibe was the opposite of his response when the disease in question was a scary African one. During the Ebola panic that gripped the U.S. media last October, Christie quarantined a nurse returning from working with Ebola patients in West Africa against her will, despite the fact that she showed no symptoms of the disease. "I don't think when you're dealing with something as serious as this you can count on voluntary system," Christie declared then. "This is the government's job."

Many doctors and public health officials begged to differ with Christie. They naively believed that the government's job wasn't to grandstand and fan the flames of anti-African hysteria, but to try to fight Ebola--by sending money, medicine and medical workers to the affected countries.

They argued that Christie was discouraging doctors and nurses from traveling to West Africa by sending the message that they would be punished for their bravery and dedication by facing unnecessary quarantines on their return--thereby making a global health crisis even worse.

But for Republicans, one person's crisis is another's opportunity to bash Barack Obama and scapegoat immigrants. During last fall's election campaign, there were political ads claiming that migrants were bringing Ebola into the U.S. via Mexico, Honduras and other Latin American countries, not one of which has ever had a single case of the disease.

Anti-immigrant demagogues frequently raise the specter of disease, probably because it is a borderline acceptable way to express the traditional racist/Nazi belief that dark-skinned foreigners are "impure" peoples, infecting the nation's racial health.

If that judgment seems unfair, consider Phil Gingrey, a medical doctor and House Republican from Georgia from 2003 until this past year. When a wave of children from Central America and Mexico fleeing violence and rape arrived at the U.S. border last summer, Gingrey wrote a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warning that many of these refugee kids "lack basic vaccinations such as those to prevent chicken pox or measles" and were therefore a threat to unvaccinated Americans.

Is it fair to call Gingrey racist based only on this letter? Maybe he's just a guy really concerned about chicken pox.

Except it turns out that Phil Gingrey is a prominent member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a far-right medical group that urges doctors not to participate in Medicare and Medicaid, argues that abortion causes breast cancer, and--wait for it--opposes vaccination requirements.

Okay. Fuck Phil Gingrey.

RACISM AND nationalism are based on false ideas of biology and culture, but that doesn't stop them from being powerful social forces. So why shouldn't some Republicans think they can start extending these concepts from people to microbes?

Mexican measles are a dangerous infestation that must be stopped at the border, but American measles are just hardworking germs trying to get by. Cut them some slack.

Perhaps some conservatives oppose vaccinations out of nostalgia, associating the polio and measles outbreaks of the 1950s with a simpler time when the U.S. dominated the globe and Black people couldn't even use all the water fountains, much less become president.

By this logic, what could be more charming than getting measles at Disneyland? That's almost as patriotic as getting trichinosis from eating undercooked barbeque on the Fourth of July.

Or maybe the anti-vaxxers are reaching further back in history--back to when Europeans conquered the land that became America by wiping out much of the indigenous population with small pox and other diseases. Maybe some Republicans want to maintain diseases to give the U.S. a long-term strategic advantage over countries that are foolishly trying to eradicate them.

For what it's worth, some of the countries that have higher vaccination rates than the U.S. include those that racists warn are hotbeds of measles: Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

In fact, in the most well-documented instance of measles crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, the disease went the other way--a Mexican tourist got the disease while visiting Disneyland. Score one for team U.S.A.

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis is raising the Republicans' pro-pestilence platform to new heights by questioning the need for government regulations requiring restaurants to instruct employees to wash their hands after using the bathroom.

Here is a Republican with a true sense of white people's history--a man who harkens back to a time before the scientific revolutions, when Europeans were known for being among the smelliest and least hygienic people in the world. Someone should ask Tillis if he thinks the elimination of the Black Plague was a case of government interference in the microbial free market.

Yet even Thom Tillis, the guy who thinks a sign in a bathroom is government tyranny, campaigned for office last fall by calling for that same government to close the entire Mexican border in order to save us all from Ebola.

Finally, there's Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, another leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, alongside Chris Christie. Paul chimed in on the vaccination debate last week, saying, "The state doesn't own your children. Parents own the children, and it is an issue of freedom and public health."

Now that's just creepy. It raises questions about what Paul thinks of laws on child abuse, child labor and mandatory education, which also interfere with the sacred parent-child property relationship so cherished by the senator.

Unlike Christie, Rand Paul is widely seen as an earnest libertarian, so perhaps he should at least be respected for being consistent in his beliefs.

Guess again. This is from Paul's campaign website.

I am 100 percent pro-life. I believe life begins at conception and that abortion takes the life of an innocent human being. It is the duty of our government to protect this life as a right guaranteed under the Constitution. For this reason, I introduced S. 583, the Life at Conception Act on March 14, 2013. This bill would extend the Constitutional protection of life to the unborn from the time of conception.

So Rand Paul believes that parents own children, but this supposed libertarian also believes that the government owns women from the moment that some cells not much bigger than a measles virus attach themselves to her uterine wall.

I disagree with parents who decide not to vaccinate their children, but I understand that most of them are motivated by concerns for their children's health.

But we should have nothing but contempt for the politicians who have joined the anti-vax movement not because they care about individual freedom--which they despise when it comes to immigrants and women--but because they see it as another chisel to chip away at concepts of empathy and social responsibility.

These people are a disease on the body politic. If only the Democrats were the cure.