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<h1>Slurs only bolster Sandra Fluke's cause</h1>
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<div class="cnnByline">By <strong>David Frum</strong>, CNN Contributor</div>
<div class="cnn_strytmstmp">updated 5:34 AM EDT, Tue September 11, 2012</div>
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<div class="cnn_stryimg640captioned"><img src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/120906023117-dnc-sandra-fluke-full-speech-00002307-story-top.jpg" alt="Sandra Fluke speaks at the Democratic National Convention. The conservative blogosphere went mad, David Frum says." border="0" height="360" width="640"></div>
<div class="cnn_stryimg640caption"><div class="cnn_strycaptiontxt">Sandra Fluke speaks at the Democratic National Convention. The conservative blogosphere went mad, David Frum says.</div></div>
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<div><strong>STORY HIGHLIGHTS</strong></div>
<ul class="cnn_bulletbin cnnStryHghLght"><li>David Frum: Sandra Fluke's speech at DNC sparked the most conservative outrage</li><li>It goes back to Rush Limbaugh's sexualized, brutal attacks on her after testimony, he says</li>
<li>Frum: Fluke wanted her college insurance to cover birth control, funded by tuition, not taxes </li><li>Frum: Disagree that religious schools include birth control in insurance, but don't revile her</li></ul>
</div></div>
<p class="cnnEditorialNote"><em><strong>Editor's note:</strong> 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, "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Patriots-ebook/dp/B007NLP46E" target="_blank">Patriots</a>."</em></p>
<p><strong>(CNN)</strong> -- Of all the speeches at the Democratic
convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, few offended conservative
listeners more than the speech by Sandra Fluke.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph2">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.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph3"><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/sandra-fluke-speech-text-_n_1852635.html?utm_hp_ref=elections-2012" target="_blank">Now here Fluke was again, on the national stage</a>,
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.</p>
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<img src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/110912013005-david-frum-portrait-left-tease.jpg" alt="David Frum" class="box-image" border="0" height="122" width="214">
<div>David Frum</div>
</div></div>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph4">"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."</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph5">Shortly before Fluke
spoke, conservative commentator Ann Coulter had tweeted: "Bill Clinton
just impregnated Sandra Fluke backstage."</p><p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph6">That was nothing compared with the outpouring of fury during and after the speech.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph7">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**."</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph8">The next day, National Review columnist and sometime Rush Limbaugh guest host <a href="http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/america-370703-fluke-one.html" target="_blank">Mark Steyn scoffed</a>:
"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."</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph9"><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/13/opinion/fluke-contraception/index.html">Sandra Fluke: Slurs won't silence women</a></p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph10">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."</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph11">Within 48 hours, the
attack had jumped from the conservative media sphere to electoral
politics. Campaigning in Addison, Wisconsin, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/08/joe-walsh-sandra-fluke_n_1867469.html" target="_blank">Republican congressional candidate Joe Walsh erupted</a>:
"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."</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph12">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.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph13">Why?</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph14">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.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph15">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."</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph16">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."</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph17">After three days of
this, advertisers began to drop his show -- and Limbaugh was constrained
to issue a grudging apology on his website.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph18">"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.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph19">"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.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph20">"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."</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph21">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.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph22">At issue in Fluke's
congressional hearing were principles of religious freedom -- and the
disposition of student health dollars -- but not taxpayer money.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph23">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.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph24">Yet somehow it didn't close: not for Fluke, and not for Limbaugh either.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph25"><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/14/opinion/fluke-why-obama/index.html">Why this election is so personal</a></p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph26">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.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph27">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.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph28">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."</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph29">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 <i>deserved</i> it.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph30">Erick Erickson of CNN and Red State.com <a href="http://www.redstate.com/erick/2012/03/02/does-carly-fiorina-just-not-get-it/" target="_blank">expressed this "she asked for it" view</a>
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."</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph31">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?</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph32">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.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph33">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.</p>
<p class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph34">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.</p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br>
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