Welfare queens and college sluts
by digby
CNN, you really need to examine your hiring policies. Your "analyst" Dana Loesch wrote this piece of drivel on her site yesterday:
Maybe Fluke's boyfriend, the son of entrenched Democrat William Mutterperl, can pay for her contraception. His father donates heavily to Democrat candidates. The couple is currently enjoying spring break in California, which poses the question of how Fluke can afford a trip across the country when she can't afford birth control pills.
I assume that CNN knows that Fluke wasn't testifying about herself and they know that she wasn't talking about her own sex life, her boyfriend or indeed, anything about her personal life. Rush Limbaugh and his band of misogynist media puppets all pretended like she did and spent days calling her a slut, saying that she had so much sex, "It's amazing she can even walk" but the fact remains that she never said she could not afford birth control.
Here is what she said, in case CNN thinks its lovely "contributor" might have even the slightest bit of journalistic integrity:
On a daily basis, I hear from yet another woman...who has suffered financial, emotional, and medical burdens because of this lack of contraceptive coverage....
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. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception. Just last week, a married female student told me she had to stop using contraception because she couldn’t afford it any longer. Women employed in low wage jobs without contraceptive coverage face the same choice.
Not that it matters. Even if Fluke had testified that she personally couldn't afford birth control, it would still not be Dana Loesch's business whether her boyfriend's father has money not is it a license for her to question whether Fluke could afford a trip. (That particular gambit was perfected by another lovely right winger, Michele Malkin who stalked the Frost family and determined that they had no right to health care subsidies for their two sick kids because they had granite countertops in their kitchen.) Contrary to right wingers' contention, you don't give up your right to personal privacy if you receive government assistance --- you certainly don't give up your right to be left alone by screeching fascists who insist that their tax dollars entitle them to tell other people how to spend their money.
But that isn't the point here at all. First of all, nobody's asking the taxpayers to pay for Georgetown students' birth control. The government is requiring insurance companies to offer coverage for birth control at no cost, just as they are required to offer other cost saving preventive health care. The only reason this has gotten turned into some sort of tax payer subsidy is because professional liars like Limbaugh and Loesch purposefully made this issue into one of "welfare sluts".
And they did this for a reason. The hard core right wing in America is largely driven by this idea that the government is taking money from hard earned tax paying Real Americans and giving it to "welfare queens" to pay the consequences of their wanton sex lives. Traditionally, this applied to women of color who were allegedly sex crazed and ended up having too many babies. Now it's applied to college women who are allegedly sex crazed and using birth control. The latter lacks the extra frisson of race but it easily falls into the same grooves. Bitches are taking hard earned money from the earners and screwing everything in sight. All these professional liars have to do is tickle that little corner of the lizard brain and it all makes sense.
It also makes sense that the right wing noise machine would activate their troops with this. It's a bit more of a mystery as to why an alleged mainstream news organization would employ someone who does it.
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