So for the last few days there has been a dustup because Sandra Fluke testified before Congress about how she was a law student at Georgetown Law and she and other students had trouble affording birth control pills and the school, which is a Jesuit school, didn’t provide coverage. Then Rush Limbaugh said this:
"What does it say about the college coed who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex?" Limbaugh continued, “It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex."
And then he said this:
“So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”
And now we see that Limbaugh apologized, which I think is right. Using birth control does not mean she is a slut, unless you think a woman is supposed to be chaste until marriage. And no, this is not prostitution under the D.C. Code or any other jurisdiction that I know of.
But in a way, Obamacare and its mandates make this kind of thing inevitable.
We’ve all been there, 17 or 18 years old, and we get into a fight with our parents or maybe a sibling does. “You can’t control me!” the near-adult says.
And the parent says, “as long as you live under my roof you will do what I say!”
For two hundred years we have understood intuitively that “freedom” and “independence” are closely related concepts. Hell, when Destiny’s Child wanted to make a feminist anthem for the movie Charlie’s Angels, they called it “Independent Woman.”
Gerald Ford once said that “a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”* It also means that the government gets to scrutinize everything in your life. It’s inevitable. If someone has to pay for something, they are inevitably going to ask basic questions, like 1) where is this money going to, 2) is this the most economical way to spend the money, and 3) do you really need what I am being forced to buy for you?
Let’s take a less explosive example: Lipitor. It’s a drug that reduces cholesterol. If there was a mandate requiring Lipitor coverage for every single person, then the questions would start. Why do you need it? Are you eating right? Are you exercising? Or more rudely: why would I have to pay for your unhealthy lifestyle.
Or it might get really rude:
(Language warning.)
And the examples of this are legion. I am not a fan of multiple piercings and tattoos, but I definitely take a “to each their own” attitude about that. But if I am forced to pay for antibiotics and tattoo removal, I am going to start having an opinion about whether you should be doing that sort of thing in the first place. If I have no choice but to pay for your skin cancer treatment, maybe I will have an opinion about you laying in a tanning bed all the time, or on the beach just sunning yourself.
And the examples of people needing treatment due to their “lifestyles” are legion. There is the obvious example of STDs. And there is always this:
You might need age verification to see that and if you don’t want to watch it is video I have used before, of people intentionally getting hit in the, ahem, beanbag. Yeah, it’s admittedly pretty funny... unless they go to the ER and you have to foot the bill, or if you have to pay for in vitro fertilization because their "boys" no longer swim. Then you start to resent that you have to subsidize their stupidity.
And personally I don’t mind paying for regular birth control, but I recognize the Catholic Church’s right to object and I believe in their right to refuse to pay for it. And when it comes to abortion—including the morning after abortion pill which is also in this mandate—and I am required to pay for it, I’m going to start asking some rude questions, the first of which being, “why the hell weren’t you using birth control?”
Now there can be a good answer to that question—the most obvious being rape. But here’s the thing: I don’t want to ask that question. I don’t want to be that involved in your life.
But if I am paying for it, I have to be. You can’t just hand out money with no strings attached. There has to be oversight. Which means that we have to ask those rude questions, like 1) where is this money going to, 2) is this the most economical way to spend the money, and 3) do you really need what I am being forced to buy for you?
See if you are paying for it yourself, you can say, “none of your damn business” to all of those questions. If a private insurance company voluntarily covers these kinds of things, you can say, “this is between me and my insurance company.” But if I have to pay for it—either through taxes, or by being forced to buy insurance that includes that kind of coverage—then it is my business.
And I don’t want to make it my business in most cases. What do I care if you spend 5 hours a day in a tanning bed? What do I care if you have every appendage pierced? What do I care if you smoke?
Liberals tell us to get the law off their damn bodies. They tell us that we should not care about things that the law has cared about for a long time, such as whether two men have sex, or whether a woman has an abortion. And then they push this law on us that forces us not only to care about those things, but about whether you smoke, get body piercings, or get a sun tan. Because under Obamacare, each of those things affect us, financially.
And in truth I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t mind want to be that involved in other people’s lives. But when you involve my money, then you start to involve me. You do not create a zone of privacy by inviting scrutiny.
So by attempting to mandate that all institutions provide free birth control—and abortion pill, let’s not forget that—the Obama administration invited us to ask the basic questions: 1) where is this money going to, 2) is this the most economical way to spend the money, and 3) do you really need what I am being forced to buy for you? And Rush Limbaugh chose to personalize it by asking about the justification of a young woman needing constant birth control.
None of this excuses Limbaugh’s bad judgment in calling Fluke a slut and a whore and it’s good that he apologized.
But what Obama has proposed forces us to discuss the amount and appropriateness of sex among college students, to make it a matter of valid government concern, when I think most of us would like to keep the government out of it completely.
And that is centered wholly on my policy preference for a respect for the “right to privacy” and not touching at all on the court-invented “constitutional” right to privacy found in cases like Roe. As I have said before, if Roe v. Wade means anything, it is an extreme application of the right to control one’s own medical destiny. And Obamacare tramples all over it. Which is why I think Justice Kennedy in particular will vote to strike it down.
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* This quote has been apparently misattributed to Thomas Jefferson. But regardless of the source, it is undeniably true.
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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates. And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here. And you can read a little more about my novel, here.
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