Few members of the General Assembly's Public Health Committee seemed to want to talk back to the vaccination opponents who shouted, screeched, and chanted at them this week as the committee approved a bill to repeal the religious exemption for vaccination of public school students. But the 14 committee members who approved the bill, all Democrats, were courageous all the same, while two Democrats and nine Republicans, voting against the bill, hid behind a bogus procedural objection -- that the committee was moving too fast -- as if the issue was not fully discussed at this week's hearing and had not been fully discussed during last year's legislative session and as if anyone has said anything new about it since.
The bill contains what would be a good political compromise if the anti-vaxxers were in a compromising mood. That is, the bill lets students already claiming the religious exemption to remain exempt. While some anti-vaxxers screamed that legislators had not listened to them, the bill's "grandfather" provision refuted that claim.
People are entitled to believe that vaccination is unsafe, though they might do better to wonder where polio and smallpox went or, indeed, why they never heard of polio or smallpox. But public policy is entitled to set health standards in public schools, and in any case the objection to vaccination has nothing to do with the exemption being claimed here -- religious belief. No one has presented any divine revelation, doctrine, or custom proscribing vaccination on pain of offending God. The issue here is simply the belief that vaccination is more dangerous than tempting the return of deadly and crippling diseases.
But it's a good bet that any parents who prevent vaccination of their children and whose children contract a serious but preventable disease as a result will claim government-funded care for the kids. So public policy would have an interest in such children even if they did not attend public school.
By repealing the religious exemption, state government won't be requiring any child to be vaccinated. Vaccination will just be the price of admission to public school. Parents who really believe that vaccination is too dangerous can send their kids to private school or home-school them. Let the bill become law to test their sincerity.
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MASSAGE PARLORS ARE NO THREAT: While Governor Lamont and many legislators are eager to raise revenue for state government by legalizing marijuana and expanding gambling, other legislators want state government to crack down on massage parlors, where prostitution is suspected. Their call was prompted by recent reports in the Hearst Connecticut newspapers linking massage parlors to human trafficking.
But a close reading of the reports showed that little if any trafficking has been committed at the parlors, at least not in the strict sense of the term. That is, no one is locked up and people are free to leave. People stay in the business not because of force or coercion but mainly because of the problems that always have encouraged prostitution -- poverty and the lack of higher job skills.
Thanks to the internet, the sex trade recently has been augmented with "sugar babies," many of them young college students looking for tuition or spending money from "sugar daddies."
Despite the contrived indignation of some legislators, human nature isn't going to change and ordinary prostitution will remain a victimless crime, of less harm to society than marijuana and gambling. If the latter two vices can be legalized and taxed, why not the former?
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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer.
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