Rather belatedly, we are becoming aware that this supposedly typical Georgetown coed is not very typical at all:
[B]irth control is not all that Ms. Fluke believes private health insurance must cover. She also, apparently, believes that it is discrimination deserving of legal action if “gender reassignment” surgeries are not covered by employer provided health insurance. She makes these views clear in an article she co-edited with Karen Hu in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law.
The title of the article . . . is “Employment Discrimination Against LGBTQ Persons” and was published in the Journal’s 2011 Annual Review.
Remember, as Byron York previously reported, Fluke was rejected as a last-minute substitute witness at a Feb. 16 committee hearing because staffers for Chairman Issa were unable to discover Fluke’s claim to expertise relevant to the subject of the hearing. This law school journal article is the sort of thing that might have been discovered about Fluke’s background, had the Democrats who put Fluke forward as a witness done so with the usual 72-hour advance notice. Here’s one brief quote from the article:
Transgender persons wishing to undergo the gender reassignment process frequently face heterosexist employer health insurance policies that label the surgery as cosmetic or medically unnecessary and therefore uncovered.
Now, imagine Fluke trying to defend this language about “heterosexist” policies in a public hearing, with Republican members of the committee questioning her about whether religious institutions (or private businesses, or taxpayers) should also be required to foot the bill for “gender reassignment.”
Congratulations, America: You’ve been scammed!
And if you think that’s bad, check out this link that McCain provides.
Excerpt:
Hormone treatments for transgendered detainees, abortion services and extensive outlets for complaints — these are just a few of the reasons Texas Republican House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith is not pleased with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) recently released Performance-Based National Detention Standards (PBNDS).
In the spirit of detention reform, in 2011, for the first time since 2008, ICE finished its revision of detention standards for those being held for being in the country illegally. Those new standards were released this month. ICE has already started to implement the changes. […]
According to Smith, however, the revisions amount to a vast and expensive expansion of privileges.
“The Obama administration’s new detention manual is more like a hospitality guideline for illegal immigrants,” Smith wrote in a statement. “The administration goes beyond common sense to accommodate illegal immigrants and treats them better than citizens in federal custody.”
The standards also outline a wide range of medical procedures available to those in detention facilities, including services such as abortion access, hormone treatments for transgendered people, dental work and a 15-day supply of medications upon release, deportation or transfer.
That’s what the left really wants – in fact, that’s already available in Canada’s socialized health care system and in the UK’s National Health Service, too. This is like the Holy Grail of the left – changing your sex from man to woman, or vice versa, and back again – all paid for by your stuck-up Christian neighbors and their children, who will have to work till they are 90 to pay for it all. Hurray for measly cheese sandwiches! Equality for all!
In addition, there is something else that emerged about this story since I wrote about it last week – the hypocrisy of the left.
Excerpt:
During the 2008 election Ed Schultz said on his radio show that Sarah Palin set off a “bimbo alert.” He called Laura Ingraham a “right-wing sl*t.” (He later apologized.) He once even took to his blog to call yours truly a “bimbo” for the offense of quoting him accurately in a New York Post column.
Keith Olbermann has said that conservative commentator S.E. Cupp should have been aborted by her parents, apparently because he finds her having opinions offensive. He called Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick.” He found it newsworthy to discuss Carrie Prejean’s breasts on his MSNBC show. His solution for dealing with Hillary Clinton, who he thought should drop out of the presidential race, was to find “somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.” Olbermann now works for über-leftist and former Democratic vice president Al Gore at Current TV.
But the grand pooh-bah of media misogyny is without a doubt Bill Maher…
And I’ll just stop it right there – don’t you dare click that link, because it is incredibly rude.
Here is my previous post on Sandra Fluke, in which I explain why her demand that we subsidize Yale Law School students who spend $1000 a year on contraception is bad for marriage and bad for children. (Note: I am not Catholic – I’m an evangelical Protestant). At least if I pick on particular women, which is rare – because I normally stick to general issues – they have to say something to deserve it. And I would never say anything as bad as what the left-wing media says about Republican women, and for no other reason than because they are conservative.
A Georgetown co-ed told Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s hearing that the women in her law school program are having so much sex that they’re going broke, so you and I should pay for their birth control.
Speaking at a hearing held by Pelosi to tout Pres. Obama’s mandate that virtually every health insurance plan cover the full cost of contraception and abortion-inducing products, Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke said that it’s too expensive to have sex in law school without mandated insurance coverage.
Apparently, four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it’s hard to make ends meet if they have to pay for their own contraception, Fluke’s research shows.
“Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggled financially as a result of this policy (Georgetown student insurance not covering contraception), Fluke reported.
It costs a female student $3,000 to have protected sex over the course of her three-year stint in law school, according to her calculations.
“Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school,” Fluke told the hearing.
$3,000 for birth control in three years? That’s a thousand dollars a year of sex – and, she wants us to pay for it.
Yes, us. Where do you think the insurance companies forced to cover this cost get the money to pay for these co-eds to have sex? It comes from the health care insurance premiums you and I pay.
But, back to this woman’s complaint that she’s spending $3,000 for birth control during her time in college.
“For a lot of students, like me, who are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary,” she complains.
So, she earns enough money in just one summer to pays for three full years of sex. And, yes, they are full years – since she and her co-ed classmates are having sex nearly three times a day for three years straight, apparently.
The problem with government-run health insurance is that it turns into nothing but vote buying. The government forces everyone to pay for coverages they don’t want so that they can redistribute the wealth from people who don’t engage in risky, costly behaviors to people who do. It encourages people to be more reckless and irresponsible when someone else is paying for it. In economics, this is called “moral hazard”. Promiscuity costs money – money for contraceptives, abortions, etc. What happens when support for promiscuity it is counted as “health care” is that people who abstain from promiscuity end up subsidizing the promiscuity of others. And that’s why we get more of it – you get more of anything when you reduce the costs of it.
The same thing happens with subsidized single motherhood by choice – the more that the government subsidizes single motherhood by choice, the more of it you get. Many women want the baby without the husband now, and it’s easier for them when the government pays for it by taking money from workers and businesses. This is in spite of the research showing how harmful the decline of marriage is to society, especially because the decline of marriage leads to increased child poverty and increased violence to women and children.
The testimony by Sandra Fluke reminds me of that Christina Hoff Sommers book “Who Stole Feminism?” where the feminists just make up numbers out of nowhere in order to blame men and portray themselves as helpless victims in need of new laws, policies and bailouts. I guess this is what they learn to do in Women’s Studies programs.
What’s scary to me is that women like Sandra Fluke become lawyers and judges and they do influence what society will look like. Men have to make decisions about what to do in a society that does not support men or marriage very much anymore.
UPDATE: A little bit more information about Sandra Fluke.
I put that in quotes because in the beginning she was described as a Georgetown law student. It was then revealed that prior to attending Georgetown she was an active women’s right advocate. In one of her first interviews she is quoted as talking about how she reviewed Georgetown’s insurance policy prior to committing to attend, and seeing that it didn’t cover contraceptive services, she decided to attend with the express purpose of battling this policy. During this time, she was described as a 23-year-old coed. Magically, at the same time Congress is debating the forced coverage of contraception, she appears and is even brought to Capitol Hill to testify. This morning, in an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show, it was revealed that she is 30 years old, NOT the 23 that had been reported all along.
In other words, folks, you are being played. She has been an activist all along and the Dems were just waiting for the appropriate time to play her.
The whole thing was engineered, but don’t expect the mainstream media to report that to you.
Who is to blame for this woman’s troubles? Well, I agree with Driscoll that her family, the church and other Christians were to blame for not telling her the truth about sex. On that we all agree. Christians do a lousy job of explaining sex to young people, because they don’t want to talk about “dirty” stuff, and they don’t want to use arguments and evidence, and they don’t want to go outside the Bible to give real reasons and evidence. But thumping the Bible is a poor response to peer pressure and pop culture.
But she and Mark Driscoll also seem to think the man is to blame. Is the man to blame?
Well, the man certainly did bad things, but I think that none of these bad things could have happened to this woman in particular if this woman had not first chosen this man from all the other men that she knew, and then given him the opportunity to do these bad things. Without her own free choices, she would never have been harmed. So her own bad choices played a part in her suffering but she didn’t mention her own choices at all. So, let me take a look at how she could have made better choices below.
Can women expect a non-Christian man to act like a Christian man?
Women need to be careful to realize that they should avoid being alone with non-Christian men, especially when they are not even old enough to be dating men at all. That’s what courting is designed to prevent, by the way – the man has to go through the father to get to the woman, and they need to be accompanied by a chaperone at all times. And in any case, a woman can get love without touching a man just by listening to the man’s words, reading his writings, letting him serve her, washing a car together, and accepting gifts from him.
Women: you don’t go to a deserted beach with a non-Christian man. Don’t take risks like that. Especially when you have probably already done a lot with the guy. And don’t drink alcohol, it impairs your judgment. The purpose of men is to marry them, not to have a good time with them. No alcohol is allowed!
Paul says that you cannot expect non-Christians to act like Christians, which is exactly what many Christian women do.
9I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—
10not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.
11But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.
12What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?
13God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked man from among you.”
14Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?
15What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?
16What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
Christians should not pursue non-Christians romantically – it’s disrespectful to God to leave him out of your romantic operations.
Women can stop a lot of the bad behavior of men just by choosing authentic Christian men by using rigorous objective criteria to evaluate men. If a woman chooses a non-Christian man, then she cannot complain if he acts like a non-Christian man. And there is more to a man being a Christian than just saying that he is, memorizing Bible verses and singing praise hymns in church. Christianity is a worldview. It has to be applied across the board. Christian women need to study to develop a Christian worldview of their own so they know how to evaluate the worldviews of candidate men.
What else can we learn from the video?
Here are a few more things that stood out to me in the video:
She should take more responsibility for their actions, instead of blaming others
She should study these things (not just the Bible!) on her own before she starts dating, to know why God puts these boundaries in place to protect her from harm
Her parents should have studied these things (not just the Bible!) more, and helped her more by being more convincing, to know why God puts these boundaries in place to protect her from harm
The church she grew up in should provide her with extra-biblical arguments and evidence from the objective external world so that she could resist ideologies like atheism, postmodernism, liberalism, feminism, etc. – she can’t act morally unless she believes that God exists and that morality is real
Women should also know that the decision to have sex before marriage with a man who isn’t a Christian doesn’t magically change him into a Christian. Sex isn’t magic. It doesn’t cause a man to like a woman, or to fall under her control.
Women go to school for 4 years to learn a trade and they need to put some effort into studying courtship rules so they can be wise about their own choices with men. Jumping into a car and trying to drive it without lessons is a good way to get killed. And emotions, intuitions, peer-pressure and pop-culture don’t help you to know how to drive a car. Be careful, think for yourself.
I also recommend that young, unmarried women become informed about anti-family, anti-father policies. If women don’t want to be hurt by men, then vote for stronger families, lower taxes, and policies that promote good husbands and good fathers. Girls need to see love modeled between a husband and wife as they grow up, and they need to have fathers in the home. Good public policies encourage men to marry and stay married.
Women need to get better criteria for choosing men
A while back, I posted on some of the criteria women have for choosing men, and here are a few:
Being tall
Being aloof and disinterested
Playing a musical instrument
Well-dressed
Stylish shoes
A deep voice
Handsome face
What do women expect when they choose men based on criteria like that? It makes no sense to blame a bad man for being bad. He’s BAD! Don’t go near him, he’ll be bad to you, too!
Shouldn’t women judge themselves first, before judging a man?
Shouldn’t women begin by removing the plank in their own eye before removing the speck from the man’s eye?
I think an excellent first step would be for Christian women to take a good look at the music they listen to, the movies they watch, and also what they read. Are they listening to Melissa Etheridge, watching “Thelma & Louise”, and reading Margaret Atwood? Are they informing themselves about truth in many areas, like economics and cosmology, so that they can make informed choices of men? Are they building resistance to cultural trends?
What is wrong with the woman in that video?
Shouldn’t this woman have put some effort into testing out the claims of her parents and the church by reading the Bible itself? I mentioned reading extra-biblical stuff but even the Bible doesn’t ground anything that she was doing or anything the church was telling her to do that was wrong. Driscoll seems to think that women are not obligated to read the Bible, and that if someone in the church tells them a lie, then the church is to blame. But shouldn’t we expect people who attend church to test these things out for themselves? I realize that she wasn’t a Christian, but in order to take responsibility, she could have said “I should have checked things in my Bible and so I share the blame”. She doesn’t say that because she doesn’t blame herself at all for anything that happened. Well, probably she went to church for the singing and never read what the Bible had to say – or didn’t take it as an authority. But she never blames herself for either one of those.
I noticed that she claims that if the church tells her something and she does it, then the church is to blame. Well, the church (or at least her parents) undoubtedly told her not to have sex before she was married, but she didn’t mention that in the video. Why not? Well, she only mentions things that other people tell her to blame them. When they tell her the right thing and she doesn’t do it, she doesn’t mention what they told her. Because she won’t blame herself for any reason. And Driscoll has nothing to say about that, either. Any time the church tells her something bad and she does it… it’s the church’s fault. Any time the church tells her something good and she DOESN’T do it… she just doesn’t mention it because she isn’t responsible for anything she does – it’s always the fault of someone else.
I don’t mind if she explains the circumstances surrounding WHY she made bad choices. I don’t even mind the bad choices, because I make bad choices. I just don’t like her blaming other people, I especially don’t like her blaming bad men. Bad men are bad. Don’t blame them for not being good – it’s your fault for choosing them. There are other men who are good who get no attention from women at all.
With increasing frequency I am consulted by nurses, who for the most part come from and were themselves traditionally members of (at least after Florence Nightingale) the respectable lower middle class, who have illegitimate children by men who first abuse and then abandon them. This abuse and later abandonment is usually all too predictable from the man’s previous history and character; but the nurses who have been treated in this way say they refrained from making a judgment about him because it is wrong to make judgments.
And again:
Why are the nurses so reluctant to come to the most inescapable of conclusions? Their training tells them, quite rightly, that it is their duty to care for everyone without regard for personal merit or deserts; but for them, there is no difference between suspending judgment for certain restricted purposes and making no judgment at all in any circumstances whatsoever. It is as if they were more afraid of passing an adverse verdict on someone than of getting a punch in the face—a likely enough consequence, incidentally, of their failure of discernment. Since it is scarcely possible to recognize a wife beater without inwardly condemning him, it is safer not to recognize him as one in the first place.
This failure of recognition is almost universal among my violently abused women patients, but its function for them is somewhat different from what it is for the nurses. The nurses need to retain a certain positive regard for their patients in order to do their job. But for the abused women, the failure to perceive in advance the violence of their chosen men serves to absolve them of all responsibility for whatever happens thereafter, allowing them to think of themselves as victims alone rather than the victims and accomplices they are. Moreover, it licenses them to obey their impulses and whims, allowing them to suppose that sexual attractiveness is the measure of all things and that prudence in the selection of a male companion is neither possible nor desirable.
Read the whole thing, you young women. And judge men hard. It’s good to judge them beforehand so that you don’t have to condemn them for being bad later.
WINTERY KNIGHT 