This is not about whether you should cast a protest vote.  This is about making sure that, in the process, you don’t protest something you had not intended to. 

There is no pure or clean vote in a democracy.  Every vote carries baggage.  Take the extreme case.  Donald Trump’s overt racism, misogyny, lying, and other “issues” are not minor distractions; they define him.  Anyone who votes for Trump endorses his psychopathies.  Or take a likely protest candidate for Bernie-or-Busters: Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party.  I’ve seen blogs here suggest that she is close to Bernie on populist aspects of economic policy.  Fine.  But what else does a vote for Jill Stein endorse?

We all know that there are questions about her stand on vaccinations, whether she is an “anti-vaxxer.”  As a scientist, I can say that this is not a minor distraction, either.  Science is the voice of reason in a world dominated by unreason.  It is the arbiter of fact over fiction, of evidence over arm-waving.  When we reject science, we reject our highest achievement in favor of a return to the cave.  No one should endorse, even as a protest, an anti-science, troglodytic mentality.  Before voting for Jill Stein, you need to fully resolve her vaccination stand in your own mind.

Unfortunately, that is not easy.  She is not given to definitive statements.  Consider an interview in which she was asked to respond to accusations that she is an anti-vaxxer.  The right answer would have been, “I am not.  I strongly support vaccination, and I condemn all the foolish and dangerous anti-vaccination hysteria.  Vaccination is a critical safeguard of public health.  I urge every parent to ensure that all their children are vaccinated on schedule with no exceptions.”

That’s the right answer.  It’s not her answer.

“What I say to those people is that we need regulatory agencies we can trust. … I’m definitely not anti-vax; what I have raised is the issue that we need an FDA that’s working for us, that’s not working for the pharmaceutical industry.” 

I’m not anti-vax, but …. 

Compare that to a Mitt Romney statement in the first 2012 presidential debate.

“Regulation is essential. … Every free economy has good regulation.  At the same time, regulation can become excessive.”

I love regulation, but …. 

Nobody – nobody – believes that Mitt Romney or any other Republican standard bearer would be pro-regulation.  The con is that they define “excessive,” when used to describe regulations, as “any.”  This is an old technique; is this what Stein is doing, parsing words and pandering to multiple interest like any politician?  Why should we read Stein’s ambiguous statements as any less of an equivocation than Romney’s?    

Stein, again. 

“I’m not anti-vax; I’m just saying we need good, reliable data so that the American people know what we’re doing … you get Monsanto out of there, you get the pharmaceutical companies out of there, and then we can trust…. 

Compare this to  Ted Cruz on climate change.

“We've discovered that NOAA, the federal government agencies are cooking the books."

There is no evidence that NOAA and the federal government adulterate climate change data, but how do you trust the government?  There is no evidence that the vaccination data has been adulterated, but how do you trust the government, or Monsanto, or the pharmaceutical companies, or …?  I’m not anti-vax, but until we get good data, data we can trust, even in the absence of any evidence of tampering, how do you know?  Just as “the data are not yet in on climate change,” we need more data on vaccinations, and better data.  Then we can make a decision about vaccinations.  Then vaccination might be determined to be a good thing, but not now, not yet. 

She has done the same song and dance before and since that interview.  And she has done it with homeopathy and more.  Her party’s platform embraces “alternative” medical practices.  Does she really believe that vaccines are risky and that alternative medicine is not?  One wonders whether she bleeds her patients.

If she is not an anti-vaxxer, in what sense does she support vaccination?  The least confining position would be to accept the concept of vaccination but reject existing implementations.  This would allow her to claim not to be an anti-vaxxer (distinctly different from being pro-vaccination) while still giving a wink and a nod to the anti-vaxxers.  Is that what she’s doing?  Why are we even having to parse this?

If she thinks parents should vaccinate their children, then say so.  If she thinks vaccines are too big a risk, say that.  If she thinks homeopathy is so much gibberish, then say so.  If she thinks it’s a valid twenty-first century approach to medicine, say that.  Say something, say anything, that we can hang our hats on.  As it is, the only people not confused by her insinuations and undertone are the anti-vaxxers.  They know exactly what she is saying.

There are more problems.  Her platform wants “a moratorium on GMOs and pesticides until they are proven safe.”  In a compilation of the problems Stein has with science, Bo Gardiner points also to a 2013 speech in which she “calls for the imprisonment of GMO producers using debunked claims about environmental and health effects, and the supposed suicides of hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers.”

Forget the equivocations.  This is an unambiguous embrace of anti-science claptrap and conspiratorial delusion.  Is it dearly held belief?  Is it pandering for votes?  Does it matter which?

Look, I don’t care if you hate Hillary.  I don’t care what your conscience tells you.  But this imbecility is unacceptable.  Vote for Jill Stein to protest Hillary, and you endorse anti-science gibberish.  One of our two major parties also has succumbed to anti-science lunacy, driven by greed and by pandering for religious votes in their case.  Their policies show the danger in that.

Unreason, today, has more opportunity to metastasize than ever before.  I often use The Flat Earth Society in jokes, but it is a real thing.  It has a web page.  Is it a surprise, then, that anti-vaxxers are organized on-line and have networks for propagating the faith and reaching out to other anti-groups?  They have reached into otherwise credible media perhaps by false equivalence to previous coverage.  Science denial is not an academic issue.  It is real, and it is dangerous.

Anti-vaxxers are dangerous.  If Jill Stein is one of them, even if just for convenience, then so is she.  Will that purity of conscience that prevents you from voting for Hillary allow you to vote for an anti-science candidate and party?  If you’re looking for a protest candidate for which to vote, you need to keep looking.