Rush to Her Defense
A lot of people were upset this past week when Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the recent contraceptive kerfuffle by making increasingly insulting personal attacks on a law student who testified about the merits of requiring birth control to be covered by insurance programs. I, on the other hand, was not the least bit taken aback by his comments, as I’ve known since high school that Limbaugh is a walking bullhorn of ignorance whose job is to spout ill-informed and, ideally, inflammatory rhetoric at anyone who is more comfortable with the thoughts of a raving lunatic than being left alone with their own. It’s what he does, and it’s what he’s been doing for a few decades now.
So when I read that he was making these comments, it didn’t bother me any more than when a man wearing Duane Reade bags as shoes tells me that the government is using pigeons to implant tracking devices while we sleep. After all, he’s far more entitled to his opinion than he is to my attention.
This is not to say that he’s necessarily wrong for opposing Obama’s plans to have mandatory insurance coverage of birth control. Even though I do not agree with his opinion, I am sure that many people hold similar views, and if asked, could articulate them in a calm, rational manner. But no matter the issue, Rush Limbaugh never has been one of those people, and he never will be. Saying that Sandra Fluke was “having sex so frequently that she can’t afford all the birth-control pills that she needs” does less make his case than it does to demonstrate his ignorance of how birth control pills work. (Their cost, after all, is not correlative to how often you get laid while using them, which is a good portion of the point.) Similarly, his assertion that someone who has voluntarily appeared in court is a “prostitute” seems to suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of what a prostitute actually does.
In assessing whether or not Rush should even hold the power to create a controversy, it’s also worth remembering that we’re dealing with a full-time public speaker who has not yet managed to master the English language, something he abuses much more frequently and egregiously than law students. And I don’t just mean saying that the word “slut” doesn’t represent a “personal attack,” or his extremely loose definition of the word “apology.” Limbaugh writes in said apology, “I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation.” One would think that if he can’t find the right words during a live radio session, he would at least make an effort to conjure the right ones in a prepared, written statement. But the use of the word “analogy” in that sentence seems grossly incorrect. Analogies are about comparing the similarities between two distinctly different things. Did he mean to say Fluke is “like a slut?” Maybe he meant for the analogy between the her and Obama’s birth control agenda? But even then, using an individual instance to illustrate a broader problem isn’t an “analogy,” it’s a “case in point.” If he wanted to make his allusions about the sexual promiscuity of an individual into a real analogy for the Obama administration’s plan, he should have said something more along the lines of, “If you give a girl free contraception, she’ll be as fucked as Obama’s birth control mandate!”
But, as they say, even idiots are entitled to their opinions (this one certainly is). The real problem here isn’t that Rush Limbaugh said these things, or even that he said them in public. The problem is that despite his inability to claim authority on any subject other than how much spit there is on his microphone, we’re all listening. I think we’re the ones who really owe Ms. Fluke an apology.
-TC