What Sandra Said (UPDATE, UPDATE II)

I thought it might be a nice idea to offer folks the opportunity to read Sandra Fluke's testimony before Congress. The transcript is easy enough to find. Instead of talking about Limbaugh, let's hear what Ms. Fluke said. It isn't very long at all, and the key portion follows:

This is the message that not requiring coverage of contraception sends. A
woman’s reproductive healthcare isn’t a necessity, isn’t a priority. One student told us that she knew birth control wasn’t covered, and she assumed that’s how Georgetown’s insurance handled all of women’s sexual healthcare, so when she was raped, she didn’t go to the doctor even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections because she thought insurance wasn’t going to cover something like that, something that was related to a woman’s reproductive health.
As one student put it, “this policy communicates to female students that our school doesn’t understand our needs.” These are not feelings that male fellow students experience. And they’re not burdens that male students must shoulder.

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 students pay for completely unsubsidized by the university. We did not expect that women would be told in the national media that if we wanted comprehensive insurance that met our needs, not just those of men, we should have gone to school elsewhere, even if that meant a less prestigious university. We refuse to pick between a quality education and our health, and weresent that, in the 21st century, anyone thinks it’s acceptable to ask us to make this
choice simply because we are women.

It's impossible to find a transcript this morning from Limbaugh's program (I've tried every which way; even the link at Google take you to a blank page on his website), but luckily, someone did post a partial transcript.

A Georgetown co-ed told Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s hearing that the women in her law school program are having so much sex that they’re going broke, so you and I should pay for their birth control….Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke said that it’s too expensive to have sex in law school without mandated insurance coverage. Apparently,four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it’s hard to make ends meet if they have to pay for their own contraception, Fluke’s research shows.”

Can you imagine if you’re her parents how proud of Sandra Fluke you would be? Your daughter goes up to a congressional hearing conducted by the Botox-filled Nancy Pelosi and testifies she’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills and she agrees that Obama should provide them, or the Pope. “‘Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggled financially as a result of this policy (Georgetown student insurance not covering contraception), Fluke reported. It costs a female student $3,000 to have protected sex over the course of her three-year stint in law school, according to her calculations.

“‘Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school,’ Fluke told the hearing. $3,000 for birth control in three years? That’s a thousand dollars a year of sex — and, she wants us to pay for it.”…You guys who are thinking you’re not gonna go to college? Let me just say one thing to you: Georgetown. They’re admitting before congressional committee that they’re having so much sex they can’t afford the birth control pills!

What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.

So, Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here's the deal: If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. And I'll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch....

Apart from having no relationship whatever to what Fluke actually said, Limbaugh's depraved mind sexualized this young woman to the point the real Sandra Fluke ceased to exist.

So, there you are. Ms. Fluke's testimony versus Limbaugh's . . . whatever it was.

UPDATE: At Salon, Iris Carmon takes on the growing pushback that claims liberal misogyny is just as bad as anything Rush said.

But the problem with Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, and other conservative commentators who gleefully approved of Rush, was not just their use of words “slut” and “prostitute” — the two words on which Powers (and Mitt Romney!) conveniently focused. As this helpful ThinkProgress mashup helps drive home, those words, or the sexualization of a woman simply because she’s out in public being female, are not the beginning and end of his offense. His offenses include defending the exclusion of contraception coverage on the grounds that he and his listeners shouldn’t have to pay for the greedy sexing of loose women (once again, that’s not how insurance works), and using leering, crude sexuality to demean a woman simply because she spoke up about reproductive health.

Yes, Ed Schultz called Laura Ingraham a "slut". He apologized the next day and exiled himself from the airwaves for a week immediately afterward. Yes, Maher called Sarah Palin a "slut". That he, along with long-time Hilary-haters Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann are still on the air is due far less to some liberal conspiracy against women than to corporate misogyny that supports them in their disgusting habits (I ignore Maher; Matthews and Olbermann are regularly taken to task for their hate-filled rants by many on the left, including me).

It would be ridiculous to ignore Limbaugh's two decades of misogyny when talking about this. Media Matters for America has, quite literally, pages and pages of transcripts from Limbaugh's show where he routinely treats women with disdain, crassly sexualizing any and every woman whose name crosses his desk.

The fight for women's equality doesn't know political parties or ideologies. This isn't about the fact that Limbaugh is "conservative". It is, rather, about the fact that his long history of pornographic musings about women as a way of dismissing their voices is finally catching up to him.

UPDATE II: Well, at least I'm not going totally insane.

The Atlantic Wire points out that his website has scrubbed a few offensive comments. While the “slut” comments still show up in other rants by Limbaugh, his site has removed his sex tapes comment from March 1. “The pages were clearly working a few days ago — several sites linked to them,” Elspeth Reeve reports. “The pages don’t show up on the February 29 and March 1 archives, either, though links to them still exist on other transcripts related to the controversy.”