[Vision2020] Slurs only bolster Sandra Fluke's cause

Tue Sep 11 10:57:32 PDT 2012

> Near the end of the article the author writes:
> '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.

This is crap.  The church should simply do it's job in preaching 'birth control is a sin and you'll go to hell if you use it'.  They shouldn't be meddling into picking and choosing what legal medical benefits they don't want offered in a lame attempt of 'denying benefits = preventing sin' which it does no such thing.  This is why the government steps in to broker a solution that should be acceptable to the church in that they aren't required to pay for the 'sinful' procedures / medications and yet these legal benefits aren't denied to the individual sinner.  I doubt that this will *crush* the controlling personalities of the church leadership.  And boo-hoo if it does.

Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2012 09:57:37 -0400
From: art.deco.studios at gmail.com
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] Slurs only bolster Sandra Fluke's cause

Slurs only bolster Sandra Fluke's cause

By David Frum, CNN Contributor
updated 5:34 AM EDT, Tue September 11, 2012

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 outrageIt 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."
(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,
 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.

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:
 "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
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:
 "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
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
 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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