Rush and the Single Slut
Why should anyone have to pay for someone else's choices?
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There are so many flashpoints of conflict in the culture wars which have been fought over for decades that it's easy to ignore them most of the time as a background roar. This makes them all the more startling when they suddenly explode into full visible fury.
If there's one reigning expert at making the left insensate with rage, it's Rush Limbaugh. Last week, he did it yet again - but in a most enlightening and clear-eyed way, if only we'll stop to actually think about what's being said and done as our statist opponents hope Americans never do.
The Right to Be Subsidized
As background, the Congressional Republicans have been screaming fury at Obama's attempts to force Catholic organizations to pay for contraception and abortion, things which the Catholic Church finds morally abhorrent. To expound on their views of liberty, they held a hearing featuring, as the Dems pointed out with righteous indignation, exactly no female congressmen and no leftists.
In response, the Dems rolled out their own mock-hearing to present all of the above. At this event appeared one Sandra Fluke, a sexually active student at Georgetown University.
Why is her personal, private behavior a legitimate source for public discussion? Because she made it so:
Fluke, who is in her third year of law school, testified that Georgetown did not cover contraception on its health plan, which she said could cost as much as $3,000 during a student’s law school career...
“I’m an American woman who uses contraception,” she said. “That makes me qualified to talk to my representatives about health care needs.”
“It’s not about church and state,” Fluke said at the end of today’s hearing. “It’s about women’s health.”
So, indeed, it is - or should be. Georgetown University, being a Catholic institution, believes that contraception is morally wrong. Ms. Fluke disagrees with this belief, yet chose to attend Georgetown anyway. Georgetown makes no attempt to enforce its views on her; she has every right to use these products condemned by her alma mater, and as she herself stated, she does so with impunity.
Which is entirely beside the point. What Ms. Fluke and her fellow leftists want is not the perfect sexual freedom they already enjoy; it's the power to force someone else to pay for it. The whole point of the Democrat mock-hearing was to argue that Georgetown University ought to be legally required to pay for Ms. Fluke's contraceptives.
Why can't she pay for them herself? Well, she can, of course, and is - she simply doesn't want to. She wants to pawn the bill off on someone, anyone, else, their moral convictions be damned.
In his own inimitable style, Rush Limbaugh shone a harsh spotlight on the logical consequences. Condoms are about $1 apiece; yet Ms. Fluke estimates her contraceptive costs at $3,000 over the two years of law school. That is a lot of sex by any measure, and at someone else's expense yet!
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? [emphasis added]
Again, let's hammer the point home. Nobody is saying Sandra Fluke can't have all the sex she wants. Nobody is saying Sandra Fluke can't have all the contraception she wants. Georgetown, and Rush Limbaugh, are simply saying that she should pay for it herself.
The End of Freedom
Which is really what our current great national conflict comes down to. The question of whether there are any sexual limits has long since been answered with a resounding "No!" The only question that remains now is, can you, yourself, be forced to pay for someone else's choices that you happen to abhor?
Mr. Obama demands that the Catholic administrators and students of Georgetown must pay for insurance coverage which pays for the (in their view) moral wrong of contraception and abortion. Mr. Obama, via Obamacare, demands that all of us do the same thing in our own insurance.
Yes, Sandra Fluke is indeed a self-confessed slut, Rush Limbaugh's needless apology notwithstanding, but in today's world that's a badge of honor, and in any case it's a purely private matter except when she wants other people to pay for it.
What's more to the point is that she is an economic fascist - that is, someone who vaguely believes in nominally private property, but more strongly believes in government's absolute authority to tell you how you must use that property whether you want to or not. She wants the power of government to tell Georgetown that it must use its private property to keep her hopped up to the eyeballs on the Pill or rolling in rubbers, regardless of their moral qualms or what they might otherwise prefer to do with their own money.
It's not exactly what Hitler or Mussolini would have done - they actually did ban abortions and contraceptives, at least for members of the Master Race. But it's precisely, completely identical to their philosophy that the State is all-powerful, always knows best, and anyone in its grip is a mere subject who must do as they're told no matter what.
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What does Chinese history have to teach America that Joe Biden doesn't know?
The red herring continues. The left has us talking about rubbers. They are laughing in the aisles over our stupidity. We should have simply told them one time, that she should take care of herself, and refer every other question to that one singular statement.
I have to agree with Bassboat on this, but also would like to add that the sponsors who quit on Rush can forget about having my custom unless and until they apologize as Rush did for an hour on today's radio program.
I'm not sure why he apologized because he told the truth about this typical leftist setup, but he did.
Larry,
You are absolutely correct on the sponsors and Rush apologizing. They will not have any of my business either.
Rush's analogy was a bit flawed (as is this article slightly).
If a woman is a prostitute anytime someone else pays for her contraception, then my wife is a prostitute, as are most other wives.
Rush's analogy also completely dismissed the nuances of the case. 'The Pill' is different than other kinds of contraception. It's a prescription that has many other uses other than stopping fertility. It's used for a variety of other medical issues. People close to me have used it having nothing to do with sex. There are many woman that do, in fact, require it to maintain healthy living.
Rush SHOULD have pointed out the real issue here: Obama and Pelosi are playing the long con. By turning contraception into a "women's rights" issue, they set up the precedent that all insurers should be forced to cover it, which in turn sets up the precedent that all insurers can be forced to cover myriad other prescriptions based on "pre-existing conditions" that are turned into "rights". The further they go down this road, the more health care becomes a right in the abstract, in and of itself, and the less competitive insurers will be allowed to be. They'll go out of business one by one until national health care is the defacto standard.
Essentially all of American politics is people not wanting to pay for something they want. Zoning means I don't have to pay my neighbor not to do something I don't want. Historical preservation means the owner can't change a building I like the way it is. Planning boards, wetland rules, and endangered species means people can't build homes or farm their own land.
Welfare means not paying for mistakes. Get aids, get free treatment. Get fat, get free treatment. Spend too much on a useless college degree, get loan forgiveness.
It's all about someone else paying for something we want.
Fred,
You are so right. Until we restore property rights this will continue. Alas, both sides pander to the freebies for re-election. Until only voters who pay taxes and own property are the qualified voters, we will be subjected to these thefts by law.
First off Rush Limbaugh's comments were abhorrent and completely incorrect. Personal attacks as a form of argument is the refuge of people who do not have an intellectual leg to stand on.
Using the assumption that the woman is on the pill to prevent pregnancy: A slut is a woman who freely engages in sexual activity with frequency with a relatively large number of different men. Which there is no indication that this is the case. A prostitute is a woman who gains financially from having sex. There is no indication that this woman wishes to gain financially from having sex. Therefore Rush Limbaugh's statements are factually incorrect and are simply intended to discredit the source of the information rather than the information itself.
Women in committed relationships tend to have sex far more frequently than women outside of committed relationships. Also as stated above, I also have known women that are not sexually active that are on contraception for other medical issues.
With all that aside it is easy to take the easy route on this argument and simply go for a personal responsibility argument. However, what are the costs of that to everyone else? I would assume that if a woman got pregnant the insurance would indeed have to pay for the health care associated with that. It is my understanding that child birth is expensive and so paying for birth control may be a cheap way to not have to pay for unwanted children, including potentially for the broken families, adoption costs, foster homes, and incarceration caused by the unwanted pregnancies.
Of course you can say that the women (or men) should pay for contraception themselves and thereby remove the cost from society as a whole but we know that not everyone does. From the perspective of public policy it is important to keep in mind what is best for the nation not simply what would work in a perfect world. At this point in time money and the lack thereof is very important. So it is an entirely correct argument to state:
If it is cheaper for the United States to have insurance pay for contraceptives as a form of birth control then it is to have insurance pay for child birth and the United States society pay for other costs associated with the pregnancies in cases of unwanted pregnancy then it is a good financial decision to have insurance pay for contraceptives.
Simply stating that people should pay for their own decisions and mistakes is a perfectly reasonable thing to say if you're going to take the argument to the very end. However, most people want to help out those who make mistakes. So some times paying a small amount to deflect the worst consequences for someone else's mistakes can save a lot of money down the road.
"So some times paying a small amount to deflect the worst consequences for someone else's mistakes can save a lot of money down the road"
This kind of thinking is EXACTLY WHY we have staggering debt (with no end in sight), a total erosion of personal responsibility and a Republican party that is no longer conservative.
Sorry, jony, but you're dead wrong. Rush shouldn't have used the language he used, but we should be OUTRAGED that college kids now sincerely believe that society should pay some of their bills now so that we don't have to pay for their children later.
Children are not mistakes. They are not "expensive medical problems" to be mitigated by contraceptives. Look up the term "moral hazard".
What kind of birth control is she getting for 3000 dollars! That's outrageous. You can get perfectly good birth control for 9 bucks a month from Walmart, which over the course of a 3 year law degree would cost only 324 dollars. If you include the time she would spend before law school getting her bachelors that's 7 years which comes to only 756 dollars, less than a third of her estimate.
Liberals are never bound by the truth when basking conservatives. This sort of exaggeration is typical.