Bachman listens to a lunatic and makes a fool of herself in the process

Bachmann: Gardasil causes “mental retardation”

Bachman:

There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.

Here we go again with the neo-luddite vaccination made my kid a weirdo nonsense. This is what happens when superstition masquerades as reason.

I suspect the woman making the initial claim to Bachman was being dishonest in the first place. There is a contingent of people who fear these vaccines because the disease they protect against is sexually transmitted. Rather than rationally fearing the disease itself, they fear that which inoculates against it. Why? Because even more than cancer and death, they fear that their daughters will have sex. Something that protects against cancer and death transmitted through sex, is irrationally seen as something that promotes sex, which is anathema to them.

But they cannot make that argument because normal people are not persuaded by it. No normal person sees something that protects a 12 year old girl from contagious cervical cancer as an incitement for her to go party like a co-ed on girls gone wild.

So instead they latch on to anything they can come up with, no matter how ridiculous. They freak out and get emotional, at which point they get stupid. Those who listen to them end up looking stupid as well.