Hey, anyone want to talk about Fluke’s actual testimony? It’s a pretty target-rich environment even without the “slut” angle (all emphases mine):
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.
Notice here that she’s using the term “contraception,” the sole purpose of which is to prevent conception.
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 the Fortenberry, Rubio, and Blunt legislation that would allow 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?
Awfully vague about which services the clinics cannot provide. And she really needs to differentiate between contraception and abortion, which the legislators are arguably trying to close. This next paragraph is interesting, because she brackets out different uses for The Pill than contraception, and makes these hard cases the REAL issue:
These denials of contraceptive coverage impact real people. In the worst cases, women who need this medication for other medical reasons suffer dire consequences. A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome and has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown insurance because it’s not intended to prevent pregnancy. Under many religious institutions’ insurance plans, it wouldn’t be, and under Senator Blunt’s amendment, Senator Rubio’s bill, or Representative Fortenberry’s bill, there’s no requirement that an exception be made for such medical needs. When they do exist, these exceptions don’t accomplish their well-intended goals because when you let university administrators or other employers, rather than women and their doctors, dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose aren’t, a woman’s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body.
It needs to be pointed out that the treatment for polycystic ovary syndrome is HORMONES, not birth control, which is why Georgetown covers the former but not the latter. So Fluke kinda opened herself up to the “slut” charges (or at least the “slut champion” charges) by conflating contraception with hormone therapy.
Also, that last sentence? Hullo? Isn’t that exactly why conservatives loathe Obamacare with our whole souls (as a corollary to the Constitutional issue)?
In sixty-five percent of cases, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed these prescriptions and whether they were lying about their symptoms. For my friend, and 20% of women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription, despite verification of her illness from her doctor. Her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted the birth control to prevent pregnancy. She’s gay, so clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy. After months of paying over $100 out of pocket, she just couldn’t afford her medication anymore and had to stop taking it.
Having to pry a legitimate payment out of an insurance company is not specific to Georgetown or to hormones or to anything else. All insurance companies notoriously deny payments until you challenge them.
Furthermore, I imagine that if Georgetown has a policy that covers hormones for actual health issues but not for contraception, they’ve had to deal with a lot of dishonest attempts to secure the hormones for contraception.
This next one is a doozy.
In the media lately, conservative Catholic organizations have been asking: what did we expect when we enrolled at a Catholic school? We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable burdens that impede our academic success. We expected that our schools would live up to the Jesuit creed of cura personalis, to care for the whole person, by meeting all of our medical needs. We expected that when we told our universities of the problems this policy created for students, they would help us. We expected that when 94% of students opposed the policy, the university would respect our choices regarding insurance [that] students pay for completely unsubsidized by the university.
Georgetown objects to subsidizing contraception (but not hormone therapy) out of religious conviction, which is not subject to a popular vote. (She is also saying that the university is not subsidizing the premiums at all. Is this true?) Furthermore, if the hard-luck cases she champions have nothing to do with contraception but with hormone therapy, why does she keep using the word contraception?
All y’all won’t have much trouble noodling that one over, will ya?
So Fluke kinda opened herself up to the “slut” charges (or at least the “slut champion” charges) by conflating contraception with hormone therapy.
Could you elaborate on this?
We expected that when 94% of students opposed the policy, the university would respect our choices regarding insurance [that] students pay for completely unsubsidized by the university.
I’m sorry, but the latter part makes no sense. Maybe the students are paying the full premium, but the University must be providing something (e.g. group discount) otherwise it should make no difference to students to go out and secure another insurance that meets their demands.
I wonder if 94% of students opposed the last tuition increase and were shocked when it happened anyway. Shocked!
On another front, do you think they cover the tyranny of the majority anywhere in the Georgetown Law School curriculum?
“We expected that when 94% of students opposed the policy, the university would respect our choices regarding insurance [that] students pay for completely unsubsidized by the university.”
This is idea of expecting that others respect their healthcare choice AFTER they’ve chosen to attend a Catholic school that doesn’t cover contraceptives, etc. is on par with the idea of “choice” on abortion. The time for “choice” comes before conception – they have their choice in partners (i.e. choose to have sex w/someone who would be a supportive father), choice in reliable contraceptives (or choose to take a chance by having unprotected sex), and a choice of when to have sex (there’s only a few days in the cycle when one can conceive). Talking about choice after you’re pregnant, or in Ms. Fluke’s case, after you’ve determined the schools healthcare and chosen to attend despite undesirable health care coverage, is absurd.
Hater.
What the heck is a public interest scholarship? If you agree to
advocateshill for the coalition of the perpetually aggreived, our organizational branch will pick up the tab for your law degree? Is that how it works?For all of my lifetime there has been a very successful legislative tactic used by the Democrats to effect what is in bills passed by Congress. It is to bring as witnesses ordinary people to speak on their personal woes and experiences. This testimony would miraculously align perfectly with whatever was wanted by the Democrats in the legislation under consideration.
With the success of this tactic the left has come to use it in other forums but always with an eye to getting the witness before Congress to testify in person and on camera for the larger public and the media who would regurgitate the storyline. As has been noted these stories came to be completely scripted.
With the rise of talk radio and then the internet there came to be people who were inclined to dig into these storied to check their veracity. This had not much effect until the blog-o-sphere became larger with a large audience. For about the last 10 years the left has had a problem using this tactic and they want free reign to use it once more. To do that they must discredit or destroy those two main forces that have made it impossible to use these scripted witnesses. Talk radio and bloggers.
In all cases the witnesses before Congress would be telling of their own travails. Witnesses in testimony can only offer either their own personal experiences or speak of studies they have done, professional work that they do that related to the question before Congress. So bloggers would dig into the story that the witness gave and/or their credentials and the studies offered if that is what they testified to. Crowd-sourcing has ruined the scripted stories, fake credentials, and false studies.The left was not about to let this situation stand.
Sandra Fluke is simply the latest attempt to wreck those entities who have made this tactic unusable. She was never intended to testify before Congress. Her story was not a personal account but a series on hearsay anecdotes concerning unnamed others along with numbers which had no supporting evidence on which to base them. It was as trolls online have done so many times, argument by assertion. As such would have been taken apart under questioning before a committee that was not all her supporters.
She had/has a background which contains her working on issues which, at least, sound noble, family violence, human trafficking, child slavery and nothing indicating that she is some wild wanton woman. She was bait. A tarbaby if you will for those enemies that have ruined the emotional, scripted, witness tactic. Her “testimony” was eminently attack-able, as dicentra has shown, in and of itself. What the left desired was for her to be attacked personally as they personally attack women on the right so often.
By doing so we used Alinsky tactics and doing that can be a trap for those on the right. It only works well when used against a side that is guilt culture oriented. The left is not that way. They are a shame culture and so react differently. There are some ways this can be workable is if it is used to illustrate the differences between the two sides and how they treat this kind of attack, or if the ridicule is pushed hard enough to that the other side goes berserk in public.
It would have been best in my estimation to simply attack the message and not the messenger, though what Limbaugh actually did was make a small joke, one much less offensive to women than so many more crudely done ones from the left. At the same time it is not productive to attack ones own messengers over their own messages. Whatever path some allies take that does not mean you have to join in with your enemies in criticizing them for their choices. Simply make the case you think is best against the left and let others do as they think best. The winning way will rise to the top by itself it does not and should not be pushed to the top by some elite consensus of how we should be doing things.
Top down orders of how things are to be done is for the left. Open competition is the way of the right, or should be.
TARBABY!!!!
smelling salts and fainting couches to the right
torches and pitchforks to the left
helpful pragmatic not like those conservatives to the rear!
All together now
PUSH!!!
Should I have worked in “boy”?
I heard it, geoff. Don’t pretend like it’s not there.
Brilliant insightful comment there geoff, but then you had to go and ruin it for the rest of us with your hatey bigotspeak. And now it’s all about YOU!
WHY DO WE DO THIS TO OURSELVES!
I want to tag onto geoffb’s perusal of the tactical operation of this Fluke “testimony” incident, by raising the question of the history of these non-Congressional “Congressional hearings”, conducted under the cover (and accepted by the press today) of the legitimacy of official conduct, parading as testimony before a pretended “committee” of Congressional auditors and questioners.
This is a fairly recent development, is it not? That is, I don’t recall obviously partisan “hearings” — which amount to no more than press conferences pretending to conduct Congressional business — outside of perhaps the last few years, certainly not prior to 2003 or so.
Can any of you all help me out here, by identifying the first incident of this behavior you can recall, and any subsequent such incidents which have come along, how these were treated in the press and how that treatment has changed over time?
It seems to me that the first attempt I can recall was conducted, or proposed to be conducted by John Conyers or the like, newly removed from his chairmanship of a committee and taking a dislike to his demotion, deciding to hold a “hearing” in a room in the basement of the Capitol when he was refused the use of Committee chambers: the attitude of the press was as I recall it, somewhat dismissive of the theater of the thing, and the attention to the substance less than rigorous. But now? What the hell is going on with this, procedurally speaking? It’s seeming as if the press has decided to disregard the theatrics altogether, to treat the substance as though it had a necessary claim on the public attention.
Any thoughts, recollections, etc.?
How about Sept 23 1995.
I doubt there were any during the 40+ previous years the Democrats had sway over House.
Good stuff geoffb. I wonder whether the descriptive “mock” showed up anywhere in the coverage of Fluke’s testimony. I’ll be betting not.
WaPo with video, sdferr.
Also that 1995 one came after a Dem walkout and they held 3 days of “hearings” on the lawn covered by everyone including CPAN.
Her core argument is that when an insurance policy won’t cover The Pill for contraceptive purposes, it makes it hard if not impossible for women on that same policy to obtain The Pill for non-contraceptive purposes.
Therefore, all of the instances of “contraceptive” that I bolded in her first paragraph represent a semantic conflation of the two uses of The Pill. She’s done it deliberately and IMO a bit dishonestly, because her argument cannot be that refusal to cover sterilization or condoms jeopardizes hormonal therapy for non-contraceptive purposes.
As it stands, asserting that people have to shell out $1000 per annum on “contraception” means (or would mean, in the absence of context) that condoms, IUDs, sponges, dental dams, and celibacy are covered in the “contraception costs $1000 per year” assertion.
Hence the opportunity for the “slut” cracks, or—because she wasn’t saying that it cost her specifically all that money for contraception—the “slut champion” cracks.
The upshot is that if Rush was wrong to call her a slut, it wasn’t on decency grounds so much as intentionalism grounds. The full context of her testimony does not claim that “we need contraception for all our abundant sex” but that “we need hormone therapy for our female organ problems.”
Her decision to use the broader term “contraception” as a synonym with “hormone therapy” is what provoked the assumption that she was talking about sex sex sex.
However, if we’re to be consistent with intentionalism, we can’t rightly attribute the slutty meaning to her words and then accuse her of being a slut.
Can any of you all help me out here, by identifying the first incident of this behavior you can recall,
I just remember the “mock impeachment” hearing for George W. Bush that the Dems staged in the basement or something. It was literally Kabuki theater without the makeup and kimonos.
It was also pathetic as hell.
“Frontline interviewed key players in the June 1988 Senate hearing at which then-Senator Al Gore rolled out the official conversion from panic over “global cooling” to global warming alarmism. Frontline interviewed Gore’s colleague, then-Sen. Tim Wirth (now running Ted Turner’s UN Foundation). Comforted by the friendly nature of the PBS program, Wirth freely admitted the clever scheming that went into getting the dramatic shot of scientist James Hansen mopping his brow amid a sweaty press corps. An admiring Frontline termed this “Stagecraft.”
Sen. TIMOTHY WIRTH (D-CO), 1987-1993: We knew there was this scientist at NASA, you know, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So we called him up and asked him if he would testify.
DEBORAH AMOS: On Capitol Hill, Sen. Timothy Wirth was one of the few politicians already concerned about global warming, and he was not above using a little stagecraft for Hansen’s testimony.
TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.
DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.[Shot of witnesses at hearing]
WIRTH: Dr. Hansen, if you’d start us off, we’d appreciate it. The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table, and giving this remarkable testimony.[nice shot of a sweaty Hansen] ”
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/17534/stagecraft/chris-horner
If you give mock testimony, at a mock hearing, on keeping from being mocked-up why is it not okay to mock you, mockingly?
It’s all just a crock, right.
link
the mock hearings are when the demonrats are out of power. when they have power they have “real” hearings.
either in or out of power the demonrats take control of the narrative.
That Frontline thing is precisely not what I’m getting at, being the standard variety press conference format interviewing people who testified before an actual Senate Committee made up of both majority and minority members, in contradistinction to a fake Congressional Committee Nancy Pelosi trots out consisting solely of Democrats.
For a better sense of the conflation that seems disturbing, look for people today saying stuff like this today (there are just a small handful of examples, there are many others):
Even Limbaugh in his apology speaks of “…discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress.” without contextualizing how fake the whole set-up was.
“there are just a few …” is a typo, it should read: “THESE are just a few …”
it goes back to in/out of power controlling the press narrative. mock or “real” they effin lie with the congress stamp of approval.
i’m just trying too how the game is played and played well by the players who play this shit 24/7/365
Whatever you may be doing, do you understand why I want to make the distinction newrouter? I mean to ask whether the concept is clear? Have I presented it such that you get it (that is, by it, I mean what I intended)? Because it’s easy for me to think that I’ve missed.
not really. i more interested how the proggs use a willing mbm.
So, is the reason for the “not really” because I didn’t explain it well enough, or because it’s simply uninteresting to you?
Here’s another example, by the way, for anyone who is interested:
i answered that above:
they did as can be seen by your example from “conservative” media
I still don’t understand how that answers the question newrouter?
On the one hand you say “not really” in response the the question “do you understand why I want to make the distinction newrouter? “, then on the other hand turn right around to say “i answered that above: etc.” as though you did understand the distinction I had in mind (which, incidentally, isn’t clear to me in the “answer” you give citing the Democrat control of the narrative). After a bit, it gets to be a little confusing, don’t you think?
no do tell.
How do you make a hormone?…
Punch her in the nuts?
Lets also remember that regardless of how true her “friend”‘s case may be, you don’t make federal friggin law based on an anecdote.
Which is why the next time someone prominent on our side is asked if Rush should have called her a “slut”, the answer should be something like “No, he should have called her a lying sack of shit, for offering testimony that would have led to charges of perjury in a real hearing instead of the circus she actually performed before.”
A simple search on google will shows that while contracepion pills may be perscribed for Functional Cysts of the overies, they are not perscribed for other types of Cysts.
I have ancedote of my own regarding this. A very close friend of mine who was my fiancé before she became disinclined to acquiesce to my request was diagnosed with cysts on her overies as well as a small tumor at the entrance to her uterus. I do no know what the medical term for that is, sorry. The tumor was removed and it was benign however the cysts persisted and her OBGYN has simply kept watch on her every six months since this occured in 2006.
Unfortunately, she was diagnoised with breast cancer in March of last year and the type of cancer she has had zero response to chemo though responded well to hormone therapy. It was also noted that the then current cyst on one of her overies was quite large and inflamed. The hormone therapy has worked and reduced the two areas where the cancer is in her breast to a point where they feel it is safe to operate and the cancer has not spread into muscle tissue or bone. She will though have to have a mastectomy due to the location of one of the cancerous areas. Interestingly enough the cyst they were watching is also now gone due to the hormone therapy. Though the down side is that basically this therapy put her into early menopause.
You think she might be called in to testify?
As an aside; she became disinclined to acquiesce to my request due to the original illness and basically told me I should find a young healthy woman to hook up with. This latest has not improved my chances I don’t think. Needless to say I haven’t?
It should be noted that she is covered under a form of Nationalized Health Care which might explain why they took the wait and see additude.
Anyway… from my perspective Ms. Fluke took extream liberties with the truth, to put it politely. But why should I? She lied.