Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University Law graduate who was in the news months ago, was attacked by Representative Joe Walsh, a Republican from Illinois, about the issue of birth control. Walsh was at a campaign event in Addison, Illinois when a video was taken of him by CREDO Super PAC. Walsh discussed the speech given by Fluke at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday. Walsh described her comments as ’embarrassing.’
“Think about this, a 31-32 year old law student who has been a student for life, who gets up there in front of a national audience and tells the American people, ‘I want America to pay for my contraceptives,'” Walsh said. “You’re kidding me. Go get a job. Go get a job Sandra Fluke.”
Fluke was invited by the Democratic Party to attend the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, which discussed the contraception rule laid out by the Obama administration. The rule requires that health insurance companies have to offer birth control coverage for patients. Fluke was blocked from speaking by committee Chairman Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, because she was going to talk in favor of contraceptives.
“It makes her a slut, right?,” radio host Rush Limbaugh said. “It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.”
Fluke then gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention that said the presidential campaign offers “two profoundly different futures” for females. Fluke said there is one future that is “look[ing] like an offensive, obsolete relic of our past.”
In that America, your new president could be a man who stands by when a public figure tries to silence a private citizen with hateful slurs. Who won’t stand up to the slurs, or to any of the extreme, bigoted voices in his own party. It would be an America in which you have a new vice president who co-sponsored a bill that would allow pregnant women to die preventable deaths in our emergency rooms. An America in which states humiliate women by forcing us to endure invasive ultrasounds we don’t want and our doctors say we don’t need. An America in which access to birth control is controlled by people who will never use it; in which politicians redefine rape so survivors are victimized all over again; in which someone decides which domestic violence victims deserve help, and which don’t. We know what this America would look like. In a few short months, it’s the America we could be. But it’s not the America we should be. It’s not who we are.
During his campaign event, Walsh said, “We’ve got parents in this country who are struggling to buy sneakers that their kids can wear to school that just started. We’ve got parents up and down my district who are barely keeping their house. And, and, and, we have to be confronted by a woman, the Democratic Party this is what they stand for. They’re going to put a woman in front of us who is complaining that the country — you, me and you — won’t pay the 9 dollars per month to pay for her contraceptives.”
