Call Them Out By Name: Sandra Fluke, David Gregory and David Friend

After going to an Andrew Breitbart memorial event on Saturday, I am more inspired than ever to fight back against the Left.  Three things that were said stood out to me in that regard.  Number one, Dana Loesch said we need to follow Breitbart and hit Leftists by "calling them out by name."  Then Brandon Darby mentioned that the Left was taking advantage of our grief and we were losing on Limbaugh.  Finally, I'm struck with the image of Breitbart himself in this tribute video looking straight at the camera and simply saying, "War."

This is war.  I am going to defend Limbaugh from the radical Leftists who want to take him off the air.  And I am going to call out our opponents by name.  Starting with Sandra Fluke, David Gregory and David Friend.

Sandra Fluke. 
Sandra Fluke is a 30 year old woman who is president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice and went to Georgetown Law despite knowing that their insurance does not cover birth control - because they are a Catholic institution - and made it her mission to force them to change their policy.  Remember when I mentioned how feminazis lied and said a Congressional hearing on religious concerns about the Obamacare contraceptive mandate was only men?  They had wanted Sandra Fluke to testify - I guess Allison Dabbs Garrett and Dr. Laura Champion, the two women who DID testify at the "all-male" panel, just don't count as women because they don't toe the radical feminist line.

When the 30 year old woman, Sandra Fluke, did finally speak, she claimed that she and her fellow law school attendees were suffering under the strain of paying for their own birth control out of pocket - she said it costs $3,000 over a 3 year law school term!

I have no idea what kind of birth control she was claiming cost $3,000.  Out of pocket, condoms are free or about $1, the Pill costs as low as $4 a month/ $10 over three months, an IUD is $500 but lasts 5 years, etc.  There really is not a birth control that should cost $3,000 over 3 years (you can't count the first doctor's visit because obviously the yearly OB-GYN exam is covered by her insurance), this woman is vastly overpaying.  You'd think by age 30 she'd have shopped around and figured out the most economical solutions to her problem.  Why does her Catholic law school - and the rest of us - have to pay for her bad shopping choices? 

[UPDATED: On February 7th, before her testimony, Georgetown's law newspaper wrote about some of her background in radically crusading on this issue, including a campaign to lobby GU and the Obama Administration, and even a sex discrimination claim.  She explicitly says she wants to make GU's policy illegal:

Former LSRJ Co-President Sandra Fluke, 3L, organized a lobbying campaign to try to persuade the university to reverse course before the mandate was announced in August 2011.  When the campaign was unsuccessful, the group turned its efforts to lobbying the Obama administration to extend the mandate to universities like Georgetown, and even considered filing a sex discrimination claim against the school.
“We’re very excited that these regulations may make that unnecessary and would make it crystal clear to the administration that continuing this policy would be illegal,” Fluke said.

Another blogger dug into her background and wonders if she's being managed by the Glover Park Group.]

In regards to Rush Limbaugh, he was making the point that she wants others to pay for her to have sex. She wants to be paid for having sex by forcing Catholics and their insurers (i.e. every one of us who will be forced to buy insurance under Obamacare) to pay for her birth control.  He literally shouldn't have said "slut" because a slut doesn't get paid and he later retracts, but he did also say "prostitute," which better fit his analogy.  Clearly not a well thought out rant as he goes back and forth on several words.  Here is the transcript from 2/29/12 for which Rush has since apologized:

"RUSH: 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? We're the pimps. (interruption) The johns? We would be the johns? No! We're not the johns. (interruption) Yeah, that's right. Pimp's not the right word. Okay, so she's not a slut. She's "round heeled." I take it back."

Ridiculously, but predictably, Democrats are seizing on Rush Limbaugh's statement to do two things they love to do: change the subject and raise money. Even the President of the United States took time out of his busy day (presumably filled with strategy sessions on how to save our economy, lower the price of gas, and get Americans back to work) to call this 30 year old woman who shamelessly told the world about her overspending problem (hey, they have something in common!).

In response, Laura Ingraham tweeted, "Ed Schultz called me a slut last May...still waiting for Obama's call" (more on Schultz later).  Don't forget this is the same president who whined about having to take more pictures with the troops!  I hope he called from the DNC and not the White House because this was a purely cynical campaign op and Democrats are raising millions off this and the media are making in-kind contributions with all the attention they've brought to the issue - which brings me to David Gregory.

David Gregory. 
David Gregory is the host of NBC's Sunday morning show "Meet the Press" who spent the first 5 minutes of his interview with Newt Gingrich this week trying to push the liberal line on Limbaugh and birth control.  God Bless Newt Gingrich for slapping back at Gregory - Newsbusters recorded Newt's great response:

"You know, David, I am astonished at the desperation of the elite media to avoid rising gas prices, to avoid the President's apology to religious fanatics in Afghanistan, to avoid a trillion dollar deficit, to avoid the longest period of unemployment since the Great Depression, and to suddenly decide that Rush Limbaugh is the great national crisis of this week."

Newt continued:

"There is no debate about access to contraception. There is a debate, which Cardinal George of Chicago has pointed out, is a war against the Catholic Church. You do have this weird situation where President Obama apologizes to Islamic extremists while waging war against the Catholic Church."

David Gregory: useful idiot of the Left.  I hear the other Sunday morning shows made the issue a focus as well, but Gregory has the distinction of getting his butt whooped on it so I wanted to rub it in and highlight Newt's great response.

Video of the Newt v. Gregory exchange:

David Friend. 
David Friend is an Obama campaign donor and the CEO of Carbonite who decided after Rush Limbaugh apologized to still withdraw ads from his program, despite the fact that Carbonite still advertises for other men who call women sluts, Ed Schultz and Howard Stern.  Friend wrote on the Carbonite website explaining the decision to drop advertising:

“No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady. ..."

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that he has no idea that Fluke is in her 30's.  He probably thinks, like the myth the media has been perpetuating, that she's of undergrad college age.  I can't imagine him bringing up his own daughters or calling her a "young lady" (how patronizing, by the way) unless he thought she was in the 18-22 range, but I guess it's possible.  And if that's the case, then he should be equally upset that Laura Ingraham, a woman in her 40's (an age his daughters will be someday), was called a slut by Ed Schultz, one of the men his company sponsors.  Ben Howe's on the case asking, Carbonite Drops Ads from Rush Limbaugh but Not Ed Schultz?

And how about him calling Fluke "courageous and well-intentioned?"  Puh-LEAZE!  As if she was an innocent victim who was thrown into this, instead of an adult liberal activist who crusaded on this issue and ran to the press and the world to demand that the government force the religious institution she attends to violate its beliefs and give her contraception for free.  Begging for a government handout is not courageous and her years of activism on this very issue shows she was not well-intentioned.  Fluke knew full well what she was getting into and as Ed Morrissey said, "If you want your sexual choices to remain private, don’t use the government to force other people to subsidize them."

Before they made the decision to pull their ads, Friend said that "the outcry over Limbaugh is the worst we’ve ever seen."  Well, Dittoheads, let's make the outcry over them dropping Limbaugh the worst they've ever seen!  Here is Carbonite's contact page, and be sure to Tweet them and Facebook them!


This is war.  We lost an amazing leader when Breitbart died, but pieces of him live on in the hearts of millions of us now.  He is still here.

UPDATE: People are having fun with making petitions on WhiteHouse.gov:

We Petition the Obama Administration to:

• apologize to Laura Ingraham for Ed Schultz's offensive remarks about her, as seems to be White House policy now.

• return Bill Maher's $1million dollar donation unless and until he apologizes for calling Sarah Palin a "slut."

and my personal favorite:

• Resign.

UPDATE 2: The Media Research Center has an I Stand With Rush petition that I just signed, please share:

The Petition States:

I stand with Rush Limbaugh and appreciate the massive contribution that he has made to the conservative movement and our nation over the last 25 years. Rush has apologized. But the radical left will never accept it because they despise him and want him off the air. I condemn attempts by radical left-wing organizations and the media to censor Rush and his commonsense conservative message.

Related Posts:
No, Planned Parenthood, Birth Control is NOT "Basic Health Care"
Debunking the Myth that 99% of Women Are Using Birth Control
Controlling the Birth Control Debate
.

What Elle Magazine Got Wrong About Feminism And Conservative Women

Interesting article in Elle magazine by Nina Burleigh (who infamously said of Clinton, "I'd be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal") called The Best and the Rightest about conservative women, which featured Ashley Sewell (aka TXTrendyChick).  It's a 4 page article, but the paragraph that stuck out most for me was this one:

The young women I interviewed for this article share almost every goal of feminism. They want to be—and in many cases, already believe themselves to be—“empowered”: educationally, financially, sexually. But they resist any effort to put advancing their fellow women front and center. That means opposing everything from gender-based affirmative action, such as government-mandated quotas for female athletes under Title IX, to equal-pay-for-equal-work laws. So on the one hand they may lament that there are only a handful of female CEOs at Fortune 500 companies and only 17 female U.S. Senators—“It does matter,” Sewell says. “A woman’s perspective is different from a man’s.” But on the other hand, they’re not going to take to the ramparts to try to increase the numbers.

To the author, the only way to advance our fellow women is through laws and government mandates like affirmative action, quotas, and wage legislation.  How is that in any way empowering?  It doesn't even occur to her that you can advance women without government help.  Conservative women are not empowered by government handouts.  We want to do things on our own, not have the government give them to us.  Of course we want women to go into whatever field they want and can succeed in, play whatever sport they enjoy, and be paid based on merit, not gender.  But instead of government mandates or forcing public tax dollars on specious programs that are prone to mission creep, we turn to families, churches, and local communities to make this happen; we choose to support charities or volunteering to mentor girls.  It is ridiculous to say we "resist any effort to put advancing [our] fellow women front and center."

We also don't want our success to come at the expense of others, such as when men's sports programs are canceled because there aren't enough women's ones to match them as a result of Title IX.  It shouldn't be a zero sum game, everyone should have the chance to succeed based on desire and merit - not gender, ethnicity, etc.  The fact that women and men are different and have different interests or skills is another important factor that the author misses.  And women shouldn't be advanced just based on the fact that they're women, they have to be the best. 

I don't know what the author means by "take to the ramparts" regarding the lower numbers of women as CEOs and Senators, but it sounds like she wants us to raise hell and shakedown companies to hire based on gender or force laws requiring minimum numbers of women in government.  We're not going to elect women just because they are women, they have to share our values and be the best candidate in the race.

Meanwhile, the author ignores groups like Smart Girl Politics, which I (along with Ashley Sewell and Dana Loesch, who is mentioned in the piece, too) am a member of, a community that encourages conservative women leaders to run for office and gives them the tools, training and support they need to make it happen.  2010 was the "Year of the Conservative Woman" with record numbers running for public office.  A woman just won the Iowa straw poll, and a second woman might be entering the presidential race soon.  These are glaring omissions.

Finally, it is interesting that in her list of "almost every goal of feminism" the author does not refer to abortion, which, ironically, to second and third wave liberal feminists, is the litmus test for bearing the title.  I attribute this to the author trying to get rid of feminism's current connotations as a dirty word along with an attempt to make the conservative women profiled in the article appear hypocritical.  On the other hand, it could be a nod to the fourth wave conservative and pro-life efforts to break the glass ceiling and finally allow diversity of thought in modern feminism.

The new movement of pro-woman, pro-life, embodied by the group Feminists for Life, is an encouraging shift from the radical feminism that has dominated since the 1960's.  We want equal rights with men, but how is abortion an equal right?  Rights do not extend to the destruction of another human, no matter what the law says.

It is important to remember that the abortion on demand version of feminism is a relatively recent development.  The suffragettes, the original "first wave" feminists, opposed abortion (all following quotes from FFL). Elizabeth Cady Stanton explicitly contrasted abortion as antithetical to the rights of women: "When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit."

She also used the "evil" of abortion to make the case for women's right to vote, with suffrage being the remedy to abortion: "There must be a remedy even for such a crying evil as this. But where shall it be found, at least where begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women?" 

Susan B. Anthony addressed what are now common modern day excuses for abortion and decried men's role in pressuring women to abort, "No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!"

Finally, Alice Paul, author of the original 1923 Equal Rights Amendment, powerfully said, "Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women." 

These feminist foremothers knew - as today's pro-life feminists know - that, as opposed to helping women, abortion hurts and degrades women.  This is true feminism and I hope the "Fourth wave" wins out.

So the author of the Elle article is right that conservative women "share almost every goal of feminism," she is just wrong on which aspects of it we truly resist and how we advance women.