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| Image by Getty Images via @daylife |
When even casual sex requires a state welfare program,
you're pretty much done for.
By MARK STEYN / Syndicated columnist
I'm writing this from Australia, so, if I'm not quite up to
speed on recent events in the United States, bear with me – the telegraph
updates are a bit slow here in the bush. As I understand it, Sandra Fluke is a
young coed who attends Georgetown Law and recently testified before Congress.
Oh, wait, no. Update: It wasn't a congressional hearing; the
Democrats just got it up to look like one, like summer stock, with Nancy Pelosi
and Harry Reid doing the show right here in the barn and providing a cardboard
set for the world premiere of "Miss Fluke Goes To Washington," with
full supporting cast led by Chuck Schumer strolling in through the French
windows in tennis whites and drawling, "Anyone for bull****?"
Oh, and the "young coed" turns out to be 30, which
is what less-evolved cultures refer to as early middle age. She's a couple of
years younger than Mozart was at the time he croaked but, if the Dems are to be
believed, the plucky little Grade 24 schoolgirl has already made an even greater
contribution to humanity.
She's had the courage to stand up in public and demand that
someone else (and this is where one is obliged to tiptoe cautiously, lest
offense is given to gallant defenders of the good name of American maidenhood
such as the many prestigious soon-to-be-former sponsors of this column who've
booked Bill Maher for their corporate retreat with his amusing "Sarah
Palin is a c***" routine ...)
Where was I? Oh, yes. The brave middle-age schoolgirl had
the courage to stand up in public and demand that someone else pay for her sex
life.
Well, as noted above, she's attending Georgetown, a
nominally Catholic seat of learning, so how expensive can that be? Alas,
Georgetown is so nominally Catholic that the cost of her sex life runs to three
grand – and, according to the star witness, 40 percent of female students
"struggle financially" because of the heavy burden of maintaining a
respectable level of pre-marital sex at a Jesuit institution.
As I said, I'm on the other side of the planet, so maybe I'm
not getting this. But I'd say the core issue here is not religious liberty,
which in these godless times the careless swing voter now understands as a code
phrase meaning that uptight Republicans who can't get any action want to stop
you getting any, too.
Nor is the core issue liberty in its more basic sense –
although it would certainly surprise America's founders that their republic of
limited government is now the first nation in the developed world to compel
private employers to fully fund the sex lives of their employees.
Nor is it even the distinctively American wrinkle the
Republic of Paperwork has given to governmentalized health care, under which
the "right to privacy" the Supreme Court claimed to have discovered
in Griswold vs. Connecticut and Roe vs. Wade will now lead to thousands and
thousands of self-insuring employers keeping computer records of the
morning-after pills and herpes medication racked up by Miss Jones on reception.
Nor is the issue that America has 30-year-old school kids –
or even 30-year-old school kids who expect someone else to pick up the tab for
their extracurricular activities, rather than doing a paper route and a bit of
yard work to save up for their first IUD, as we did back in my day. After all,
the human right to government-mandated free contraception is as American as
apple pie and far healthier for you. In my most recent book, I quote one of
Sandra Fluke's fellow geriatrics gamboling in the groves of academe and
complaining to the Washington Post about the quality of free condoms therein:
"'If people get what they don't want, they are just
going to trash them,' said T Squalls, 30, who attends the University of the
District of Columbia.’So why not spend a few extra dollars and get what people
want?'"
All of us are born with the unalienable right to life,
liberty and a lifetime supply of premium ribbed silky-smooth, ultrasensitive,
spermicidal, lubricant condoms. No taxation without rubberization, as the
Minutemen said. The shot heard round the world and all that.
Nor is the core issue that, whatever the merits of
government contraception, America is the brokest nation in history – although
the Fluke story is a useful reminder that the distinction between fiscal and
social conservatism is generally false.
As almost all those fashionable split-the-difference
fiscally conservative/socially liberal governors from George Pataki to
California's pathetically terminated Terminator eventually discover, their
social liberalism comes with a hell of a price tag. Ask the Greeks how easy it
is for insolvent nations to wean the populace off unaffordable nanny-state
lollipops: When even casual sex requires a state welfare program, you're pretty
much done for.
No, the most basic issue here is not religious morality,
individual liberty or fiscal responsibility. It's that a society in which
middle-age children of privilege testify before the most powerful figures in
the land to demand state-enforced funding for their sex lives at a time when
their government owes more money than anyone has ever owed in the history of
the planet is quite simply nuts.
As stark staring nuts as the court of Ranavalona, the
deranged nymphomaniac queen of Madagascar at whose funeral the powder keg
literally went up, killing dozens and burning down three royal palaces. Indeed,
one is tempted to arrange an introduction between "T Squalls, 30,"
now 32 going on 33, and Sandra Fluke, 30 going on 31, like a skillfully
negotiated betrothal between two royal houses in medieval Europe. The student
prince would bring to the marriage his impressive fortune of a decade's worth
of Trojan Magnums, while the Princess Leia would have a dowry of index-linked
RU 486s settled upon her by HHS the Margravine of Sebelius. They would not be
required to produce an heir.
Insane as this scenario is, the Democrat-media complex
insists that everyone take it seriously. When it emerged the other day that
Amanda Clayton, a 24-year-old Michigan million-dollar lottery winner, still
receives $200 of food stamps every month, even the press and the bureaucrats
were obliged to acknowledge the ridiculousness. Yet, the same people are
determined that Sandra Fluke be treated with respect as a pioneering
spokesperson for the rights of the horizontally challenged.
Sorry, I pass.
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,"
wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1784. In the absence of religious virtue, sexual
virtue and fiscal virtue, one might trust to the people's sense of sheer
preposterousness to reject the official narrative of the Fluke charade. Yet even
that is not to be permitted.
Full disclosure: I will be guest-hosting for Rush Limbaugh
this Monday, so it would not be appropriate for me to comment here on Rush's
intervention. But let me say this. Almost every matter of the moment boils down
to the same story: the Left's urge to narrow the bounds of public discourse and
insist that "conventional wisdom" unknown to the world the day before
yesterday is now as unquestionable as the Laws of Physics. Nothing that Rush
said is as weird or as degrading as what Sandra Fluke and the Obama
administration are demanding. And any freeborn citizen should reserve the right
to point that out as loudly and as often as possible.
©MARK STEYN
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