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There are so many flashpoints of conflict in the culture wars which have been fought over for decades that it's easy to ignore them most of the time as a background roar. This makes them all the more startling when they suddenly explode into full visible fury.
If there's one reigning expert at making the left insensate with rage, it's Rush Limbaugh. Last week, he did it yet again - but in a most enlightening and clear-eyed way, if only we'll stop to actually think about what's being said and done as our statist opponents hope Americans never do.
As background, the Congressional Republicans have been screaming fury at Obama's attempts to force Catholic organizations to pay for contraception and abortion, things which the Catholic Church finds morally abhorrent. To expound on their views of liberty, they held a hearing featuring, as the Dems pointed out with righteous indignation, exactly no female congressmen and no leftists.
In response, the Dems rolled out their own mock-hearing to present all of the above. At this event appeared one Sandra Fluke, a sexually active student at Georgetown University.
Why is her personal, private behavior a legitimate source for public discussion? Because she made it so:
Fluke, who is in her third year of law school, testified that Georgetown did not cover contraception on its health plan, which she said could cost as much as $3,000 during a student’s law school career...
“I’m an American woman who uses contraception,” she said. “That makes me qualified to talk to my representatives about health care needs.”
“It’s not about church and state,” Fluke said at the end of today’s hearing. “It’s about women’s health.”
So, indeed, it is - or should be. Georgetown University, being a Catholic institution, believes that contraception is morally wrong. Ms. Fluke disagrees with this belief, yet chose to attend Georgetown anyway. Georgetown makes no attempt to enforce its views on her; she has every right to use these products condemned by her alma mater, and as she herself stated, she does so with impunity.
Which is entirely beside the point. What Ms. Fluke and her fellow leftists want is not the perfect sexual freedom they already enjoy; it's the power to force someone else to pay for it. The whole point of the Democrat mock-hearing was to argue that Georgetown University ought to be legally required to pay for Ms. Fluke's contraceptives.
Why can't she pay for them herself? Well, she can, of course, and is - she simply doesn't want to. She wants to pawn the bill off on someone, anyone, else, their moral convictions be damned.
In his own inimitable style, Rush Limbaugh shone a harsh spotlight on the logical consequences. Condoms are about $1 apiece; yet Ms. Fluke estimates her contraceptive costs at $3,000 over the two years of law school. That is a lot of sex by any measure, and at someone else's expense yet!
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? [emphasis added]
Again, let's hammer the point home. Nobody is saying Sandra Fluke can't have all the sex she wants. Nobody is saying Sandra Fluke can't have all the contraception she wants. Georgetown, and Rush Limbaugh, are simply saying that she should pay for it herself.
Which is really what our current great national conflict comes down to. The question of whether there are any sexual limits has long since been answered with a resounding "No!" The only question that remains now is, can you, yourself, be forced to pay for someone else's choices that you happen to abhor?
Mr. Obama demands that the Catholic administrators and students of Georgetown must pay for insurance coverage which pays for the (in their view) moral wrong of contraception and abortion. Mr. Obama, via Obamacare, demands that all of us do the same thing in our own insurance.
Yes, Sandra Fluke is indeed a self-confessed slut, Rush Limbaugh's needless apology notwithstanding, but in today's world that's a badge of honor, and in any case it's a purely private matter except when she wants other people to pay for it.
What's more to the point is that she is an economic fascist - that is, someone who vaguely believes in nominally private property, but more strongly believes in government's absolute authority to tell you how you must use that property whether you want to or not. She wants the power of government to tell Georgetown that it must use its private property to keep her hopped up to the eyeballs on the Pill or rolling in rubbers, regardless of their moral qualms or what they might otherwise prefer to do with their own money.
It's not exactly what Hitler or Mussolini would have done - they actually did ban abortions and contraceptives, at least for members of the Master Race. But it's precisely, completely identical to their philosophy that the State is all-powerful, always knows best, and anyone in its grip is a mere subject who must do as they're told no matter what.