Brethren: May the Lord’s Peace be with all of you.
The following opinion piece by John Hayward at Human Events reflects very well my own thoughts on the subject of M(is)s Fluke’s recent controversy on birth control. Here’s an excerpt:
Now that we’ve all had a few words to say about the inappropriate use of certain words toward certain people, what were we originally talking about, again? Oh, that’s right: forcing Catholic institutions to act against their religious conscience, and violating the economic liberty of people in general, by forcing them to pay for “free” birth control.
Why are we doing this? According to leftist agitator Sandra Fluke, it’s because female students at Georgetown are being driven into penury by the financial burden of paying for their own birth control. She claimed to have conducted a study showing it cost them $3,000 over the course of a three-year law school education for these supplies. As a result, “forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggled financially as a result of this policy,” by which she meant those stuffy Catholics refusing to pay for contraception.
Right about the time liberals went mad over radio host Rush Limbaugh’s attempt to satirize Fluke’s demands, people began asking where this thousand-dollar-per-year figure could possibly have come from, since condoms are widely available for little or no cost, and birth control pills were readily available in the Georgetown area for less than $10 per month without insurance coverage.
The very conveniently timed burst of outrage over Limbaugh’s comments short-circuited all attempts to challenge Fluke’s fanciful numbers, ten times higher than the actual cost of contraception. Even a normally fair-minded reporter like ABC’s Jake Tapper simply refused to challenge Fluke’s claims during an interview. When blogger Ace of Spades called him on it, Tapper’s response was, “If you have issues with her testimony, take them up with her. If you have issues with what Rush said, take it up with him.”
Well, okay, Mr. Tapper. Then what do we need reporters for? Have you at least got a number where everyone in America who has questions about Fluke’s testimony can reach her to obtain clarification?
Why was it necessary for Fluke to absurdly inflate the actual cost of contraception? Her basic demand, which is that other people should be obliged to pay for her contraceptives, should not depend on the cost of the materials involved. The logical validity of the argument is unchanged if those supplies cost $120 per year or $1,000 per year. But, of course, the emotional urgency of the appeal disappears when we’re talking about pills that cost ten bucks at the local Target store. Such a sum could not be portrayed as bankrupting hapless coeds, so it wouldn’t strike many people as important enough to warrant over-riding the First Amendment and bringing the heavy boot of ObamaCare down on the neck of Georgetown University.
Please, continue reading here.
Commentary. If M(is)s Fluke had defended the public financing of a given addiction to the tune of thousands of dollars per person, per year, there would have been more public outrage at her stance. However, that’s precisely what she did, for the underlying “addiction” consists on the abuse of female sexuality outside of the marriage bond, for the pursuit of vacant, recreational pleasure, as an exercise of absolute feminine authority over her body. Were men to assert the same “rights” and therefore contravene the dominant culture, we wouldn’t hear the end of it.
Not that it matters either way. As the Apostle said:
Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. 19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. (1 Corinthians 6: 18-20, NIV)
That a student from a Catholic university went on before members of Congress to defend sexual immorality under the guise of “reproductive rights” should make us pause. Without falling into vulgar name-calling, M(is)s Fluke’s stance moves me to question her morals and her personal integrity, her newly found personal celebrity and sense of victimhood notwithstanding. In her case, her character should be questioned as much as her opinions and probed for real, objective moral value.