Free Speech is the answer to the unadorned hate of Limbaugh,
and no one demonstrates that more brilliantly than Sandra Fluke.
Ms. Fluke, at the age of 30, already has a distinguished career
of public service including working at batter women’s shelters in NY and advocating
on behalf of the GLBT community. She has been active in the fight to include insurance
contraception in insurance coverage at Georgetown University and was the former
President of the student group Law Students for Contraceptive Justice.
Students at GU are required to buy Health Insurance by the University.
The school then makes a religious rights argument which translates to mean that
female students are not allowed to receive contraception through the insurance
policy for which they are required to pay without exception. Ms. Fluke has
actively engaged the President of the University, John J. DeGioia, on the
subject of contraception and other women’s health issues. DeGioia for his part
was not silent in the face of Limbaugh’s bigotry: “She was respectful, sincere, and spoke with
conviction. She provided a model of civil discourse. This expression of
conscience was in the tradition of the deepest values we share as a people. One
need not agree with her substantive position to support her right to respectful
free expression.”
After a few days
of intense heat, some now argue it is time to move on, time to forgive Mr.
Limbaugh. His radical views of white male supremacy they seem to suggest no
longer merit examination and condemnation. For f***s sake, it’s been three days
already! Forgive and move on they say. This is only the most recent crest of a
seemingly unending wave of right wing recrimination, blame, bigotry, and
hard-heartedness in this election cycle. So count me among those who is reluctant
to turn the page, very reluctant, and more than a little pissed off. I hope Limbaugh
wallows in his vile sh** for a good while longer. He so deserves it. There are
no doubt millions in his audience that are true believers, but with Limbaugh
one must always remember that he makes tens of millions per year spewing his
message of hate and intolerance. Let him simmer until he gags from the stench
of his own breath.
But leave the
first amendment alone…
For those that argue that Sandra Fluke was a private citizen
and so deserving of some special protection against slander, which suggests that
Limbaugh cannot park his fat ass under a First Amendment umbrella, there must
first be a separation between the legal and the political. Perhaps there are
those that would ever so slightly twist the record to make Ms. Fluke seem
somehow smaller, a less public figure. This may be a practical legal strategy, opening
the door for a slander suit, I don’t know. But as a matter of politics Sandra
Fluke stands as a ringing rebuttal of Limbaugh’s hate speech. Far from being
merely a private citizen, Ms. Fluke is a highly accomplished and articulate
public advocate for progressive policy change. She is to be applauded for her
public advocacy, and admired for her fearlessness.
Her written testimony is practical and direct. There can be
little doubt that Ms. Fluke is informed on the subject of contraceptive rights.
So much has been made of the Limbaugh’s remarks Ms. Fluke’s statement has
barely been spoken of. In it she addresses the broad issues of contraceptive
coverage in Insurance policies as a specific issue of women’s health, not
limited to birth control. She also raises her objections to the Blunt amendment
and other proposed legislation, which gives lie to the suggestion that the
Congressional panel at which she was forbidden from speaking, was narrowly
engaged on the subject of Freedom of Religion. This panel was convened in an attempt
to define the issue as one of religious freedom before someone like Ms.
Fluke called bullsh**! Even so, apparently only men were capable of speaking on
this issue that day. Following is a small excerpt of Ms. Fluke’s written testimony:
Without insurance
coverage, contraception can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a
lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that’s
practically an entire summer’s salary. Forty percent of female students at
Georgetown Law report struggling financially as a result of this policy. One
told us of how embarrassed and powerless she felt when she was standing at the
pharmacy counter, learning for the first time that contraception wasn’t
covered, and had to walk away because she couldn’t afford it. Students like her
have no choice but to go without contraception. Just on Tuesday, a married
female student told me she had to stop using contraception because she couldn’t
afford it any longer.
You might respond that
contraception is accessible in lots of other ways. Unfortunately, that’s not
true. Women’s health clinics provide vital medical services, but as the
Guttmacher Institute has documented, clinics are unable to meet the crushing
demand for these services. Clinics are closing and women are being forced to go
without. How can Congress consider allowing even more employers and
institutions to refuse contraceptive coverage and then respond that the
non-profit clinics should step up to take care of the resulting medical crisis,
particularly when so many legislators are attempting to defund those very same
clinics?
On the day of the hearing Ms. Fluke was not permitted to
speak, her first amendment rights shaded to grey in an attempt to silence her
attempt to bear witness. Limbaugh’s over the top rhetoric was a further attempt
to interfere, to further darken her first amendment light, this time through intimidation
and fear. In the face of that, Ms. Fluke
went on TV this morning and pointed the world to www.mediamatters.org for a lengthy history
of the record of Mr. Limbaugh. Up yours, Rush…
As Ms. Fluke argues in her testimony it is ridiculous to
cast the issue of insurance coverage for contraceptive care as purely being
about birth control, but even if that were true, the arguments to make insurance
coverage mandatory are still compelling. Beyond the reaches of a small band of
religious zealots this is long settled policy, but these are the battles we
fight in this election cycle of bigotry and fear.
Mr. Limbaugh blithely impugned the integrity of Ms. Fluke,
but in doing so he disregards the obvious truth; the equation of sexual
relations (at least those being discussed here) is that is a woman AND a man.
The woman is of low morals, so he says, but in the argument Limbaugh presents
the man is absent. In too many cases when there is an absence of birth control,
that is the practical fact. As late as
2007 40% of all children are born out of wedlock. Much of that can be
attributed to the changing face of American families, but there is a sizeable
proportion where whatever can be said of the woman a man did not want to be a
responsible partner.
I heard about 45 minutes of Limbaugh’s Friday, and know the
complete dishonesty in his apology. Even on Friday, given a day to think over
the remarks, Limbaugh while refraining from the course language, made clear
that he felt well entitled to direct his bitter hatred towards Ms. Fluke in the
way that he did. I heard more than one caller put up, who underlined the
vitriol against the Ms. Fluke, so much so that even Limbaugh had to wonder what
he had unleashed. Limbaugh and his followers have a long history of this sort
of mutually reinforcing mega-dittos bullsh**.
Callers and Limbaugh outdo each other in their blinding rage, and bitter
isolation. Limbaugh lives an extremely opulent life off his shtick, his listeners
not so much.
That being said, the answer to hate speech-- which is what
Limbaugh practiced and will continue to do once the dust settles-- is strong
voices who say we do not accept and we do not agree, in other words more
speech. Those of us who want to see Keith Olberman, Rachel Maddow, the
participants on those shows, and other strong liberal voices such as Sandra
Fluke on the air would do well to remember that First Amendment protects all
speech. There is no practical way to allow a portion of it to be shredded. It stands
as a blanket of protection for everyone, or none. Stand in front of Limbaugh’s radio
stations and the offices of his corporate masters and call Limbaugh what he
is-- A racist, misogynist, neo-fascist. He is all those things.
But tread lightly, and step clear of the first amendment…
If liberals act now to protect some shattered sense of
civility they are phenomenally off track.
Civility is not constitutionally protected and woe be the day that it
is. I have argued on these pages and elsewhere that the rising sense of uncivil
dialogue is not good for the country or our political discourse, bit I do not
deny the right of my opponents to be uncivil. Liberals who practice similar disrespectful
dialogue lower themselves down a deep hole when they parrot this eye for an eye
bloodletting. Dancing on the grave of an opponent is ugly and diminishes the
humanity of both the deceased and the dancing fool.
Look, if I want to call my neighbor, El Rushbo, (or our
President for that matter) a fat toad, I can. That is constitutionally
protected speech. If Rush were dragged into court by Ms. Fluke, that is
certainly her right, but we can be quite certain that the NY Times, The
Washington Post and most likely MSNBC, along with all the usual-suspects right
wing media outlets would line up as friends of the court to defend his free speech
rights, and well they should.
It is truly amazing to me the speed and ferocity with which
Americans now glibly trade away their rights. Western liberals, to use the
broadest sense of the word, used to worry about Orwellian government. 1984 was
practically required reading for certain groups of counter culture thinkers.
Now in the name of our bruised sense of civility we trade all that in.
Advocates on both sides are only too glad to advocate the elimination of the
speech rights of the “other”. I would argue that the progressive American left
especially needs to nurture and protect these rights even in the face of highly
charged and disgusting remarks by our opponents. In the face of the onslaught
of Citizen’s United Cash, our side needs Free Speech more than ever. We cannot
win by silencing our opponents and those that suggest we can are just plain
wrong. We win by convincing a majority of Americans that we are correct and
that those that expose their true instincts and feeling through the use of
rabid hate speech are wrong.
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