White Conservatism and Child Sacrifice

White conservatives in the State of Tennessee are now triggering a large-scale, ritualistic sacrifice of their own children. The relevant event is an edict by the Tennessee Department of Health to suspend communications concerning childhood and adolescent vaccines. From the Tennessean:

The Tennessee Department of Health will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach – not just for coronavirus, but all diseases – amid pressure from Republican state lawmakers, according to an internal report and agency emails obtained by the Tennessean. If the health department must issue any information about vaccines, staff are instructed to strip the agency logo off the documents.

The rationalizations from the Department of Health seem to be that Tennessee wants to stress the authority of (white conservative) parents in relation to vaccinations and that the public health authorities avoid attacks from the right-wing media apparatus.

But there’s something more archaic going on. Republican state lawmakers, conservative media types, and religious leaders are all aware of the statistics on Covid and equally aware that a percentage of children would become seriously ill or die from diseases like hepatitis, rubella, whooping cough, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and polio.

The areas of concern span much farther than just the COVID-19 vaccine, though. The new TDH policy applies to all vaccines — even common childhood vaccines such as Chicken Pox, Measles, Mumps, Polio, and even hepatitis.

What it gets down to is that white conservatives in Tennessee are not only willing but INSIST on a percentage of their children being sacrificed. Of course, human sacrifice has a long history in Western culture. Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to change the winds was part of the Homeric saga of the Trojan War, written anew in Classical Greece by poets like Euripides, and re-staged recently in “Troy: Fall of a City.” However, the champions of child sacrifice around the ancient Mediterranean appear to be the Carthaginians who practiced child sacrifice on a massive scale right up to the final conquest by Rome in 146bce.

‘There was a peculiar dualism in Carthage . . . in which the thrust for commerce, prosperity and the good life were blended with a religion so intense that the richest Carthaginian could cheerfully consign a son or daughter to the flames of the sacrificial pit to redeem a pledge to the gods.”

What’s different about Tennessee conservatives (really white conservatives in general) is that the Carthaginians sacrificed their children to propitiate the gods while Tennessee conservatives are setting up the sacrifice more as a PROTEST against public health as am emblem of science as an element of the emergence of the United States as a multicultural, socially liberal, and secular society. Conservatives in Tennessee are so deeply offended by all of these developments that they’re willing to see their kids die rather than cooperate in science-based vaccination.