The irony is so thick you could cut it with a wooden spoon. The Democrats are trotting out every filly they have to run in the race started by Todd Akin's unfortunate comments about abortion last week. It begins to look as though Sandra Fluke (rhymes with look) is going to be the Dem's Joe the Plumber this election cycle. According to a response to a Michelle Malkin column, Fluke saw that Georgetown's insurance did not cover contraception and, "she decided to attend with the express purpose of battling this policy." If she is representative of the party, then another clear distinction between parties is being drawn.
Sandra Fluke made her debut in the news back in February when she protested the Georgetown University policy of excluding birth control from student health plans (see Washington Post.) This was in the midst of the media storm revealing that Obamacare would not give Catholic institutions an exemption from the requirement to provide birth control to employees, regardless of their long-standing opposition it.
The crux of Fluke's argument was that she represented a large body of women at Georgetown who wanted to have unrestricted access to birth control. Unless I am mistaken, the primary reason to take the pill is to prevent pregnancy, and pregnancy only happens after sexual intercourse. I think the Catholic church is also against that in extramarital circumstances. Doubtless some of the women Fluke claims to represent are married, thus avoiding the double jeopardy, but I have not found any indication that she meant to specify married women's rights, so her argument is twice flawed. She wants women to have the church-supported right to commit two sins (as defined by the Catholic church.)
While protestants agree to disagree on the ethics of birth control, there is no argument concerning sex outside of marriage: the Bible clearly says it is wrong. As Francis Fukayama insightfully suggested years ago in The End of History, easy access to effective birth control fundamentally changed society. Decoupling pregnancy from sexual coupling broke down the major barrier to non-professional female promiscuity. The subsequent lowering of resistance to and eventual wide acceptance of abortion as a method of birth control completed the revolution.
Society has arrived at the point where a woman not only can have, but according to Fluke, should be paid to have contraceptive options, making free love truly free, at least free of the emotional and financial burden of child rearing. One wonders, however, if there are not hidden costs in all this freedom. Not surprisingly, God had his reasons for sequestering sexual activity within the institution of marriage. In the same way that ignoring the law of gravity can have painful, long-term effects, flaunting the restrictions on sexual activity exact a price as well. Teen pregnancies and single-parent households, predominantly headed by women, are plaguing our society. No one can deny that these are results of sexual freedom and they cost us something.
Taking another tack, allowing men to have their choice of multiple sexual partners without committment does not raise the status of women; it lowers it. When women can dictate the terms of sexual engagement and demand commitment by the man, backed by society's moral framework, women become the real arbiters of power. But apparently the Fluke-style Democrat woman wants a different kind of freedom; she wants the freedom to have unlimited sex with any number of partners with no commitment by either participant. That is part of the Democrat platform. And it would be naive to deny that abortion is one nail in that party plank.
Progressives like to talk about abortion as a matter of women's reproductive rights. This terminology introduces a red herring: making abortion a reproductive right is the same as saying infanticide is a form of family planning. A woman's right to reproduce begins and ends with her right to control who gets into bed with her. "Not tonight , Dear; I have a headache," is supposed to be sufficient restraint for any gentleman. "Not until after the wedding," is supposed to be the societal norm, Christianly speaking. Once again, Fukayama agrees saying, "moral values and social rules are not simply arbitrary constraints on individual choice but the precondition for any kind of cooperative enterprise." Democrats don't agree.
No discussion of women's rights would be complete without a question about the rights of some 27 million women who have been murdered since 1973. That is approximately how many female fetuses have been aborted since Roe v. Wade. Forget for the moment that it is biologically, philosophically and Biblically sound to insist that human life begins at conception. If an acorns gets crushed, the forest is minus one oak tree; if a tadpole gets eaten, there will be one less frog in the pond; if an embryo, fetus or whatever one calls the product of human conception gets terminated, one less human will have the chance to breathe.
Here is the distinction: you can march with the Democrat party of Sandra Fluke, or vote Republican with someone like Michelle Malkin who chided Rush Limbaugh, but continued, "Young Sandra Fluke of Georgetown Law is not a “slut.” She’s a moocher and a tool of the Nanny State. She’s a poster girl for the rabid Planned Parenthood lobby and its eugenics-inspired foremothers." If there is a war on women, the Democrat's policies have far more "kills" than the Republicans. Anyone who still thinks the two parties are the same is not paying attention.
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