Each year at the CPAC (which is the Conservative Political Action Conference) you get speeches from pundits, politicians, and various other speakers. When the organizers invited Phil Robertson, the patriarch of the Duck Dynasty family franchise, they should have expected a speech that would be different from anything you normally hear at a CPAC conference.

I first heard about the speech when I tuned into a talk show and heard the host criticize the speech and the CPAC organizers for scheduling it. No one will ever accuse Phil Robertson of being “politically correct.” Some of his laugh lines also cause some people to roll their eyes or shake their heads.

But he did say some things about STDs that Jonah Goldberg decided to defend in a recent op-ed in USA Today. He points out that a talk on sexually transmitted diseases has not been high on the CPAC agenda. Maybe it should be. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 110 million Americans have an STD, that’s one third of all Americans.

Phil Robertson put it this way: “It’s the revenge of the hippies! Sex, drugs, and rock and roll have come back to haunt us, in a bad way.” If you don’t like that quote, Jonah Goldberg reminds us what Tom Wolfe said about doctors working at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in 1968. They encountered maladies “no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names.”

I remember this well since I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in that era with a father that worked in the pharmaceutical industry. The traditional rules of hygiene and sexuality were tossed out the window. The hippies that rejected these rules of morality and common sense paid a price and spread those diseases to others.

Perhaps the most fitting quote comes from humorist P.J. O’Rourke. He said: “The sexual revolution is over. The microbes won.” The microbes in this case are the STDs that now infect one third of all Americans.