[Vision2020] Slurs only bolster Sandra Fluke's cause

[Art Deco]

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Slurs only bolster Sandra Fluke's cause
By *David Frum*, CNN Contributor
updated 5:34 AM EDT, Tue September 11, 2012
 [image: Sandra Fluke speaks at the Democratic National Convention. The
conservative blogosphere went mad, David Frum says.]
Sandra Fluke speaks at the Democratic National Convention. The conservative
blogosphere went mad, David Frum says.
 *STORY HIGHLIGHTS*

   - David Frum: Sandra Fluke's speech at DNC sparked the most conservative
   outrage
   - It goes back to Rush Limbaugh's sexualized, brutal attacks on her
   after testimony, he says
   - Frum: Fluke wanted her college insurance to cover birth control,
   funded by tuition, not taxes
   - Frum: Disagree that religious schools include birth control in
   insurance, but don't revile her

 *Editor's note: David Frum is a contributing editor at Newsweek and The
Daily Beast and a CNN contributor. He is the author of seven books,
including a new novel,
"Patriots<http://www.amazon.com/Patriots-ebook/dp/B007NLP46E>
."*

*(CNN)* -- Of all the speeches at the Democratic convention in Charlotte,
North Carolina, few offended conservative listeners more than the speech by
Sandra Fluke.

There are plenty of good reasons to be annoyed. From the conservative point
of view, Fluke is on the wrong side of a battle over religious freedom.
Back in March, she testified in favor of a proposed Obama administration
rule that would require Catholic institutions, like her own Georgetown
University law school, to reject the teaching of their church and cover
contraception in their university health plans -- plans not funded by
taxpayers, by the way, but by tuition and other university revenues.

Now here Fluke was again, on the national
stage<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/sandra-fluke-speech-text-_n_1852635.html?utm_hp_ref=elections-2012>,
warning that a vote for the Republican ticket in 2012 was a vote for "an
America in which you have a new vice president who co-sponsored a bill that
would allow pregnant women to die preventable deaths in our emergency
rooms. An America in which states humiliate women by forcing us to endure
invasive ultrasounds we don't want and our doctors say we don't need.
 [image: David Frum]
David Frum

"An America in which access to birth control is controlled by people who
will never use it; in which politicians redefine rape so survivors are
victimized all over again; in which someone decides which domestic violence
victims deserve help, and which don't."

Shortly before Fluke spoke, conservative commentator Ann Coulter had
tweeted: "Bill Clinton just impregnated Sandra Fluke backstage."

That was nothing compared with the outpouring of fury during and after the
speech.

Stephen Kruiser, who hosts on the conservative Internet video site PJTV and
appears on Fox's "Red Eye," tweeted mid-speech: "Tricky camera work to keep
TV audience from seeing (David) Axelrod's hand up Fluke's a**."

The next day, National Review columnist and sometime Rush Limbaugh guest
host Mark Steyn
scoffed<http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/america-370703-fluke-one.html>:
"Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite
education ... and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the
Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception
of 30-year-old children."

Sandra Fluke: Slurs won't silence
women<http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/13/opinion/fluke-contraception/index.html>

James Taranto, columnist for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal,
was nearly equally scathing. "Seriously, the party of Andrew Jackson and
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman chose to showcase someone whose
claim to fame is that she demands that somebody else pay for her birth
control."

Within 48 hours, the attack had jumped from the conservative media sphere
to electoral politics. Campaigning in Addison, Wisconsin, Republican
congressional candidate Joe Walsh
erupted<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/08/joe-walsh-sandra-fluke_n_1867469.html>:
"Think about this, a 31-, 32-year-old law student who has been a student
for life, who gets up there in front of a national audience and tells the
American people, 'I want America to pay for my contraceptives.' You're
kidding me. Go get a job. Go get a job, Sandra Fluke."

There's never any shortage of vitriol in political commentary, but usually
it's reserved for the headliners. Yet Fluke provoked more sputtering in
five minutes than former President Bill Clinton did in a speech 10 times as
long.

Why?

The answer takes us to the events that put Fluke on the stage in Charlotte
in the first place: Rush Limbaugh's brutal, sexualized attack on her
congressional testimony.

On the day after Fluke spoke, Limbaugh demanded: "What does it say about
the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee
and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make
her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be
paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the
contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have
sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps."

Limbaugh returned to the subject again and again, escalating his abuse over
three consecutive days. "So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you feminazis,
here's the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus
pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the
videos online so we can all watch."

After three days of this, advertisers began to drop his show -- and
Limbaugh was constrained to issue a grudging apology on his website.

"For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three
hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in
my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.

"I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political
times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before
members of Congress. I personally do not agree that American citizens
should pay for these social activities. What happened to personal
responsibility and accountability? Where do we draw the line? If this is
accepted as the norm, what will follow? Will we be debating if taxpayers
should pay for new sneakers for all students that are interested in running
to keep fit? In my monologue, I posited that it is not our business
whatsoever to know what is going on in anyone's bedroom nor do I think it
is a topic that should reach a presidential level.

"My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I
created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the
insulting word choices."

In this grudging half-apology, half-justification, Limbaugh misstated the
facts of the case. Taxpayer money was never at issue between Fluke and
Georgetown. When Fluke and her fellow students paid tuition to Georgetown,
they got health coverage as part of the deal.

At issue in Fluke's congressional hearing were principles of religious
freedom -- and the disposition of student health dollars -- but not
taxpayer money.

Limbaugh's misstatement had the benefit of permitting him a change of
subject -- and a way out of a damaging controversy. And it allowed his
friends and supporters to pronounce the matter closed.

Yet somehow it didn't close: not for Fluke, and not for Limbaugh either.

Why this election is so
personal<http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/14/opinion/fluke-why-obama/index.html>

Other male commentators have used belittling, misogynistic language against
other women in the public eye. Both Republican and Democratic women have
found themselves on the receiving end of condescension and epithets.

But Limbaugh did something different with Fluke: Aggressively and
deliberately, over a long span of days, because his own commercial
interests require shock and controversy, Limbaugh had promoted Fluke into a
totem and martyr. When Democrats later claimed that Republicans "waged war
on women," Limbaugh's tirade became Exhibit A -- at least until Rep. Todd
Akin's "legitimate rape" comment demoted it to second place.

At the time of the tirade, a number of Republican politicians spoke out
against Limbaugh. U.S. Sen. Scott Brown called Limbaugh's comments
"reprehensible" and former Senate candidate Carly Fiorina condemned them as
"insulting."

Yet as time has passed, the regrets faded. An idea was born and grew that
somehow Fluke must have provoked what was said of her, must indeed have *
deserved* it.

Erick Erickson of CNN and Red State.com expressed this "she asked for it"
view<http://www.redstate.com/erick/2012/03/02/does-carly-fiorina-just-not-get-it/>pungently
in a March blog post: "Of course Rush Limbaugh was being
insulting. He was using it as a tool to highlight just how absurd the
Democrats' position is on this. It's what he does and does quite well. And
in the process he's exposing a lot of media bias on the issue as people
rush out (no pun intended) to make Sandra Fluke a victim of his insults and
dance around precisely what is really insulting ? her testimony before
congress that American taxpayers should subsidize the sexual habits of
Georgetown Law School students because, God forbid, they should stop having
sex if they cannot afford the pills themselves."

That mood, an undercurrent until recently, gushed into full view on the
night of Fluke's convention speech. If the words "slut" and "prostitute"
are not to be used, she must nonetheless be the thing indicated by those
not-to-be-used words: a woman whose sexuality is for sale. Because if she's
not -- if she's merely a concerned citizen who expressed in a public forum
a diverging view of the appropriate relationship between church and state
-- then what does that make Limbaugh?

And what does it make those who rallied to defend Limbaugh? Something
pretty ugly, right? Which is why it remains today so urgently necessary for
so many people to demean and defame this woman.

The correct reply to Fluke is that she is a person intolerant of the
religious liberty of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church does good
works on a vast national scale -- caring for the sick, teaching children,
supporting the homeless -- all to uphold its compassionate doctrines in a
harsh world. Once government starts imposing its rules on a church, then it
crushes the spirit that leads the church to do its good on the world.

You can say all that without hurling accusations of nymphomania,
freeloading and sexual exhibitionism. In fact, omitting such vile insults
makes the rebuttal more convincing, not less. But that's not how Rush
Limbaugh does it, and he has taught a generation of conservative
shock-mongers to do the same or worse.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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