Slut Fits
Slut Fits
©2013 Ross Williams
About a year
ago we were presented with Reason #619 why 15 minutes of fame for some is 16 months
too many. Some strumpet named Sandra
Fluke – a nobody women’s issues “activist” with a compulsion for public
exposure – was invited to testify in front of a House committee on an upcoming
bill to exempt religious employers from having to provide insurance which
covers, under the Obamacare Borg, free birth control. She was asked by the Democrats on the
committee to explain why they should not
be exempted ... during the slot set up for religious organizations to testify
as to why they should.
She regaled
those Democrats – the Republicans left the room – with a dog’s vomit of new
age-y buzzwords and sentimentalist foppery.
From a practical standpoint, her testimony boiled down to:
1] she’s among the millions of young, fertile, sexually active women in the US who
1] she’s among the millions of young, fertile, sexually active women in the US who
2] doesn’t
want to get pregnant, and therefore
3] needs
birth control, but
4] isn’t
earning enough to purchase birth control herself and still pay her iphone bill, and thus
5] wants the
insurance company to completely pay for birth control for her: fair’s fair.
To reduce
even this nutshelling of her twaddle
into a bumper sticker, she essentially declared, “I wanna fuck without consequences;
you need to gimme”.
I completely
understand her position on this. I mean,
who doesn’t wanna fuck without
consequences? Not only do I understand
her position, but I also understand the nature of her argument. Everyone of a certain immature age, and
sometimes well beyond if they’ve been “enabled” away from the real world long enough,
can provide a ready litany of rationalizations why he should be given what he
wants and why it’s others’ responsibility to foot whatever bill there may be.
These responsible
others are, if the birth controlee has employer-provided group insurance, the
birth controlee’s co-workers and employer, for they are the ones coughing up
the money to provide an individual something at zero cost to that individual;
if the birth controlee is among the nation’s 15% working uninsured that
Obamacare was designed to cover at taxpayer expense, then those others are the
taxpayers. Sandra Fluke wanted
taxpayer-provided consequence-free fucks.
But while I
understand where she’s coming from, I find it financially injurious to be
forced to provide a woman her birth control if said woman isn’t my wife or
daughter. And unless she’s my daughter,
to be forced to provide it without the fringe benefit of sharing a
consequence-free fuck for as long as my providence is coerced is to add insult
to the injury. I am no more above
advocating for my own selfish self-interest than Fluke is, nor of giving a less
inherently offensive justification for it in the process: I’ve seen pictures of
Fluke and she’s definitely fuckable, so if she wants others to underwrite her
consequence-free fucking she needs to make it worth our while. Fair’s fair.
The “I
wanna” is perfectly understandable as basic, crude, garden-variety
self-interest. The “it’s your obligation
to gimme” is also understandable as the self-involved thought process inherent
to any teenager. Anyone who currently
has teenagers, remembers having teenagers, or honestly recalls their own
attitudes when they passed through the age themselves knows this. So personally I’m fine with her issuing an
intellectually offensive argument, fraught with stilted, self-indulgent emotion.
But the
personal is not, and never has been, political.
And Congressional testimony is political.
As a
libertarian who’s read the First Amendment, I fully support her petitioning the
government for a redress of her grievance over paying for her own birth
control. But, as the same libertarian
who has also read the Article I, Section 8 list of what Congress is allowed to
do and not seeing any form at all of family planning, health care
decision-making or consequence-free libertinism, I realize that she can
petition all she wants upon anything she wants, but on most things the answer must
be “That’s outside the scope of allowed federal authority.”
In short,
she has no more Constitutionally legitimate expectation for having the general
public – either privately or publically – provide her with free birth control
than anyone from that general public has, having provided her with free birth
control, to justify demanding she provide sexual favor in return.
Apparently
sensing the cognitive dissonance in Fluke’s unidirectional concept of societal
obligation among supposedly free people, the social conservative cheerleader,
Rush Limbaugh, called her a slut on his radio show for wanting to be sexually
active with no consequences on someone else’s dime. And I have to say ‘apparently’ Limbaugh
sensed this, because who truly knows what Limbaugh senses. Loosely speaking – ha ha – she is indeed a
slut. Honesty compels me to say Limbaugh
was right in this instance, just as honesty would compel Fluke, if she were
honest herself, to acknowledge he was.
But she is
far from the only slut in the Obamacare dialog.
First of all, there’s those who support the facile notion that just
because a large group of people in our nation wanna, they are entitled to a gimme. I am talking here about the millions of
Obamacare supporters who still are not a majority, by the way; they’re also
sluts.
Even that’s
not all. For calling Fluke a slut,
Limbaugh was catcalled the nation over, many of his radio show’s sponsors
pulled their ads and a few local stations talked about cancelling his show. Within a week, Rush Limbaugh performed the
same formulaic penance we’ve heard over and over, and which I’ve grown weary
of: the insincere public apology.
Limbaugh wanted to continue having a radio program but without ads to
pay for it and locals to carry it his show was in jeopardy; he needed his
sponsors to buy back their ad-time in order to stay on the air. So Limbaugh, in a delicious pot-kettle
moment, is a slut as well, prostituting his political ideology for the sake of his
own public exposure.
Obamacare –
the thoroughly misnamed “affordable care act” – has been sent into beta-testing
this year by group health insurers the nation over. Every
large employer who has not already dropped employee health coverage, or will before
2014, has implemented what their loyyers tell them will be the Obamacare
requirement. They’re doing this a year
early just to have a shake-out period.
2013 is the Obamacare tire-kicking and door-slamming test drive.
All through
2013, these companies’ corporate loyyers are going to be asking these
questions:
“What are
Obamacare’s requirements ... really?”
“What are
Obamacare’s costs ... really?”
I don’t completely
respect loyyers as a group. First,
they're willing to sell their integrity to any client who can cough up a
retainer; second, they'll argue in favor of all laws even when the law is wrong;
third, they don’t understand that laws are usually wrong. But loyyers do know, generally, that simply going
by what the Obamacare brochure says is a quick way for their client to be sued
for a bazillion bucks by the federal government. Oh sure, the executive overview SAYS “affordable”, but affordable to whom? and how
much of this required affordability can we really afford to provide?
Loyyers
aren’t stupid; they’re just arrogant sluts in business suits.
My own
company has implemented Obamacare a year early. As a result, if I were to have gone with the insurance
coverage I had last year it would have cost me several times what I paid a year
ago –all those “affordable” requirements added into it are massively costly to insure. I would have had the same nominal co-pay, but
a 362% increase in premiums to make up for it – part of which was to be my
forcible contribution to my lesser-paid co-workers’ health insurance payments.
... I apparently don’t earn the money I make any longer; others earn it – I
just do the work.
The other insurance
option was to enter a “wellness” plan, which would cost less in premiums than the
insurance plan I had last year, but with only a 170%-plus rise in premiums ...
not including the “free” birth control, well-baby care and preventive care that
Obamacare requires; it would offset the lower premium increase with a massive
deductible. Part of this “wellness”
nonsense is submitting to nosy third-parties butting into my health and
health-care decision-making in return for having my company provide a portion
of my huge deductible expenses by contributing to a Health Savings Account.
We opted for
the “wellness” nonsense and the nosy third party intrusion that comes with it, merely
for the cash it brings. Yes I, too, am a
slut.
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