My Buddy has sent me a counterpoint on the Rush Limbaugh fooferah. Except its not really about Rush. Its a WSJ op ed piece offering cogent criticism of Sandra Fluke who wanted to testify for the required inclusion of birth control pills in her student insurance.
What about Rush Limbaugh? I won’t defend his use of epithets (for which he’s apologized), but I understand his larger point. At issue isn’t inhalers for asthmatics or insulin for diabetics. Contraception isn’t like other kinds of “health care.” Yes, birth-control pills can be prescribed to address medical problems, though that’s relatively rare and the Catholic Church has no quarrel with their use in this circumstance. And the university’s insurance covers prescriptions in these cases.
Still, Ms. Fluke is not mollified. Why? Because at the end of the day this is not about coverage of a medical condition.
Ms. Fluke’s crusade for reproductive justice is simply a demand that a Catholic institution pay for drugs that make it possible for her to have sex without getting pregnant. It’s nothing grander or nobler than that. Georgetown’s refusal to do so does not mean she has to have less sex, only that she has to take financial responsibility for it herself.
Should Ms. Fluke give up a cup or two of coffee at Starbucks each month to pay for her birth control, or should Georgetown give up its religion? Even a first-year law student should know where the Constitution comes down on that.
First and foremost this issue has only been tangentially about insurance and first amendment rights to practice one’s religion as conscience dictates. That was the issue until Rush Limbaugh – the sacrosanct “conservative” pundit – weighed in. Rush took a vulnerable argument and he attached sluttery, prostitution and juvenile jokes about an oversexed law student hobbling to class after orgiastic bouts of sexual athleticism. Ha Ha Ha.
The Pope of poop is having to eat his own. Cheers!
I wrote a few posts back about my wife, Claudia, having had insurance coverage for her, our, contraceptives. I mentioned what I’d written to her (she never and I mean never) reads my blog. She corrected me. We paid for her pills out of pocket. then she added, “and it wasn’t fair.”
That was forty years ago. She was prescribed “the pill” long before she became sexually active. She had a highly irregular menstrual cycle that was debilitating. I guess, not being a woman, that its not good to go two months without a period only to have two kick in over a two week period following that.
I was a blessedly clueless guy. That menstruation stuff was stuff I didn’t really want to know about. When my younger sister was hit with puberty and suffered and my Mom made her hot toddy’s to get through it I really wished I didn’t know anything about it.
Then I got married and suddenly my wife’s health was my concern. I remember the helpless dismay I felt upon opening the bathroom door and finding her passed out from the pain of her period. I called the hospital and was appalled when the female voice on the other end of the line seemed pretty indifferent to my plea for help. I guess other women can be pretty blase about this subject.
So, Buddy, your point is taken. It was taken by me long before the voice of true conservatism called Sandra Fluke and by implication my wife and daughter sluts and prostitutes. As far as I’m concerned this hasn’t been about contraception or first amendment rights. Its about a king with no cloths vomiting out puke and an entire political party, once my entire family’s political party, eating it up without blanching.
