For the record, it was here at UnifiedPatriots, a congregation of mature adults, that the first public call went out for a national debate over the forcible requirement of contraception against the religious beliefs of others.
Since the title of that article was “Slutty White Women and the Church”, it seems we also opened the flood dikes (oops!) for the Slut-gate that has followed, and now camped in Rush Limbaugh’s lap.
I’ll get into a scientific defense of Mr Limbaugh’s comments and make a real pitch for a real national debate in due course, but first want to set the stage a bit.
First, A First Amendment Threat
During the Bush I administration, on his Firing Line show, William Buckley hosted a group of college kids on the subject of “Should homosexuals be declared a victim class, as blacks before them?” It was a polite Q&A.
The leader of that group was a pretty law student from Rutgers who was the head of the campus Gay & Lesbian chapter. After some back and forth, this smartly dressed young woman just came right out and said what her real complaint was, which I paraphrase here from memory:
I should have the right to go and come as I please without any person being able to take any objection that I am a lesbian.”
Buckley, in his usual nonchalant manner, quietly asked, “How would they know?”
WFB begged a question, actually an issue, that has bothered me since, but he went no further with it on his program.
You see, that girl’s comment inferred a constitutional right of protection from other people’s thoughts and opinions.
Be warned, this thinking is common among gays, some blacks and women, almost all better educated and conditioned to think this way. Ordinary people do not see the world this way. For example, my gay brother’s partner of 40 years is a broken record that some stranger half way across the country thinks poorly of his sexual preferences.
Teaching in college in the 90s, I also noted this same view by a few of the young black (female) students. I told those students that if they wanted to lose sleep because some redneck across the river in Kentucky was riding around with a Confederate flag in the rear window of his pick-up, go ahead. “But the people who will do you harm know you by name.”
This is a law, and practical people understand this. Many gays, blacks and women do not.
A restatement of the “rights” inferred by that girl on Buckley’s show offered only one of two options: 1) that the state should criminalize/penalize hateful thought that is turned into speech, or 2) the state should proceed with a stiff curricula of indoctrination in government schools, and to penalize thoughts and words administratively rather than through the courts.
This latter course is the one they have most chosen for at least thirty years.
This is no small matter, for government schools have been a laboratory for state-controlled thought for many years, with a view toward quasi-criminalizing any thinking, especially religious, that may be contrary to state standards.
They aren’t even sneaky about this anymore, for as we heard from some official after the North Carolina lunch room fiasco, where a child’s prepared lunch was returned home because it was insufficient for the her need, she said, “Teachers know what is best for the child, not the parent.”
And how schools then mete out punishment in these cases is by singling the child out for ostracism and public humiliation, parents included, which is precisely how society for thousands of years have punished all sorts of wanton public behavior, including the case at hand; sluttery.
Take Sandra Fluke
Please.
At this writing Rush Limbaugh apologized to Sandra Fluke for doing to her exactly what public schools do to our children routinely who follow parental moral guidance rather than the school’s. He singled her out.
About apologies I had a hard and fast rule: If I unintentionally offend someone I will crawl across broken glass to apologize, but if the offensive remark was intended to offend a certain person or class, I am unrepentent. Mr Limbaugh violated a law as ancient as small town sluttery itself…you never call a slut a slut to her face in front of others. It was boorish, and while a case in first instance in many respects, for Ms Fluke may be the first woman to proudly stand before a microphone and proclaim that she is a slut, still, I suppose good manners requires we speak to the disease rather than a proud and willing carrier.
So, continuing….
But is she? A slut that is? I guess it depends on what your definition of “slut” is. And what might a respectable replacement term be, if that is what is at issue here, merely the use of a crude term? “Fallen woman” was often used, as “lady of the evening” was for prostitute, which itself was a cut above the more common “whore”?.
But isn’t this really about not allowing any disparaging word or thought at all, as the lesbian babe from Rutgers told Buckley 20 years ago? And isn’t this about threatening, intimidating then punishing, as they are trying to do with Rush Limbaugh, any public outcry over a condition that just a generation ago societies uniformly wanted to keep away from the mainstream of the culture. Even the Europeans bundled all those babes up and put them in their own red light district.
And therein lies the crux of the matter. So let’s back up.
You know the Sandra Fluke story, a 30-year old Georgetown law student. She gave a press conference that was made to look like a congressional hearing, in front of Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats. In it Ms Fluke spoke of an active sex life on her own behalf as well as several other female (I assume) students at Georgetown.
I’m certain Ms Fluke lied in some parts of her testimony, but in typical Democrat fashion, considering the protected venue where she couldn’t be cross-examined or required to offer any proof other than her own word, no one raised their hand.
She delivered the report as if she were a case study officer at G’town instead of a student. She was clearly a sleeper (oops!) at Georgetown for it’s reported she selected Georgetown (a Jesuit university) primarily because it did not offer contraception in its insurance plan, which suggests someone else may have been paying her way. An embed activist.
Ms Fluke’s “testimony” was offered to reinforce President Obama’s demand that Catholic institutions offer free contraception, which Dick Morris confirmed is pushing a lie that the GOP wants to turn back contraception rights (which constitutionally Congress or the states can’t do, and Fluke, of all people knows it) to shore up a voter bloc (single women) who have been falling out of love with Obama for two years now.
Ms Fluke’s intent, I am sure was not to draw personal attention to herself, as I am sure neither she not any of her sponsors ever considered that the public might pay untoward attention to her loose sexual proclivities.
Unlike previous arguments for the poor’s access to contraception, clearly Fluke’s testimony was aimed at the better educated, more affluent, college-aged and young professional girls who are maintaining just the kind of sexual life style she described…but who are too stupid to know their right to contraception is inviolate.
There’s story in that all by itself, for Susan Fluke’s generation, the Millenials, are the first fully-weaned generation where possibly the only moral teaching they ever got was in the public schools.
In defense of Rush Limbaugh
Mr Limbaugh doesn’t need any defense, but hey, I called them “sluts” first.
Mr Limbaugh has already lost three accounts, among them Quicken Loans and Select Comfort, who, you sort of think might want to hold onto that part of their clientele who sleep around a lot and are in regular need of a loan. Makes sense, actually. Carbonite will lose my business as soon as I can undo the damn thing.
Sluts, Society and Social Science
Mr Limbaugh, like myself, is from a generation 40-50 years ago in which the term “slut” fit exactly with the kinds of conduct Ms Fluke described.
I’ve used that word, along with harlot, doxie, trollop, hussy, tart, tramp, floozy since I was a kid. I learned most of them from my mother.
Forty years ago any of those term automatically applied to girls and women who had multiple sex-partners, in and out of marriage, but were not for hire…except maybe a ride in a sleek Pontiac convertible or Chevy Woodie. (Oops!) I could never offer more than a pack of Beechnut Gum, and didn’t have a car, so was out of luck with the two sluts in my school on any account.
But like Marc Anthony (and Bill Clinton), I come not to bury sluts, but to acknowledge them… for the necessary role they all played in turning some boys into men, and other men into boys around America, before they moved to another town in order to start a new life with a clean slate, which most of them did…until the rise of the porn industry in the 1970s.
As the price that private vice pays to public virtue, I also come to praise the art of sneaking. I’m for anything anyone wants to do in the privacy of their own homes and keep it hidden from view.
So I rise to defend public virtue and let you keep private vice where it belongs.
But Sandra Fluke came to me, in my home and tried to draw me into her world of sexual adventurism and just as bad, sordid cheapskatery, then demand that I take no moral notice of the transgressions she outlined.
You see, “slut” is a term or moral approbation, and unless you can provide me with another more seemly term…”loose” might work…only by her standards, Ms Fluke’s friends are so loose they jiggle, I have to assume there is a conspiracy afoot to deem her sexual activity a “moral act” by government fiat…just as the state has defined religion a public immoral act when Johnny draw a picture of Moses.
In our day (Limbaugh, me) every town had a few sluts, and every school a couple. 1%-2% tops. Rush proves it is boorish to call them this to their faces, but the term had a clear public purpose to other girls in our town: These are girls who will never be taken home to meet some boy’s parents. So don’t be that girl.
Sound unfair? Well yes, you might think so, but there’s a lot of social science behind the way this has worked for centuries and considering how cultural, social and personal lives in America have changed since we first began criminalizing the self-policing rights of people to say (ostracize) what they believe about public immorality, I think enough evidence is in to hire a hall and convene a forum.
Call for a National Debate
And what I want to know first, is are we debating the word “slut” or the conduct?
For the term “slut” isn’t just a term of approbation. It’s also a demographic term, speaking of a few persons at a far end of society, a very distinct minority. Even I admit we have a problem once sluttery’s defining conduct speaks to 40% of the population rather than the normal 1%-2%, I used to know. Only in gold rush boom towns did sluttery outnumber common ordinary decent folks as they seem to now.
Ms Fluke has proclaimed her own proclivities, so I want someone to stand before my team, eye to eye, and state that such conduct is now deemed appropriate, or at least harmless, and yes, it would be okay for their 16-year old daughter to screw as many boys in school as she pleases, just so long as it’s safe…and the state is reimbursing them for the cost of her contraception.
Then I want to present my evidence…too voluminous to outline here…to the contrary, that no, society is on the verge of collapse, and it has nothing to do with banking and public debt.
And I won’t have to invoke God even once, but I will invoke nature, which God works through most of the time anyway, both of whose judgments are final, without appeal. Unlike Man, God and Nature’s definition isn’t on a sliding scale, for the activity has very real and predictable consequences. Many of us never get to find this out until it is too late.
So I’m calling for a public forum, like D’Souza and Hitchens (RIP), for the simple reason that the proponents and defenders of sluttery will refuse to participate.
For one, they don’t like being cross-examined, especially as to facts, (Ms Fluke lied about some of her “facts”) even as our 6th Amendment right to cross-examine our accusers goes unprotected.
In fact no Democrat, from Obama on down, could withstand a cross examination on facts of any kind.
The media and the Left have too long enjoyed the luxury of being able to intentionally confuse political, legal, moral, and even factual issues. With socialists everything is political, and politics is their religion, so you can see the ease with which they do this. The people do not agree, and are entitled, and quite frankly, still have the power, to invoke their right to be heard….besides the ballot box.
This is not a political issue and should be left out of the campaign debates, except as to the extra-legal (unconstitutional) intrusions Obama is trying to make on conscience with the church mandates, and has been going on in public schools for forty years.
But since Ms Fluke has offered up a tail (sic) we can grab hold of, I think we need to grab it and not let go.
