Every year, TIME Magazine, a periodical which continues to insist upon its own relevancy despite the fact that no one under the age of 40 reads it, nominates a list of people to be its Person of the Year. The criteria for having this title bestowed upon you is that you be “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”
This year, they have nominated Sandra Fluke, the young woman you are sick to death of hearing about. The Georgetown law student was used as a political prop to great effect by Democrats when they held up a megaphone to her battle cry that Georgetown – a Catholic university – doesn’t provide enough access to birth control pills for female students. This led Rush Limbaugh to suggest that maybe someone who wants someone else to pay for their birth control pills could possibly maybe be a “slut,” and then every fauxminist in the world rallied around her and President Obama called her on the phone to make sure she was okay and then the “war on women” and “reproductive rights” and Republicans are mean and the Democrats win.
Here are my top three reasons why Sandra Fluke totally deserves to be TIME Magazine‘s Person of the Year:
3. The make-believe “War on Women” is a huge reason why Obama won. He got 67% of the single female vote. It played a ginormous role in winning him the presidency, and Fluke was instrumental in getting him that vote. Fauxminists love Fluke. She has that intellectual, gently lesbian look that fauxminists love: kind of pretty, like a younger Demi Moore, but also a bit prickly and “I’ve read more than you.” Single chicks dig that. They want to invite her over to drink wine and listen to Tori Amos. She is a “soul sister,” fighting for the rights we all deserve, like free birth control pills paid for by our big Catholic daddies who are mean to us and have oppressed us with their patriarchy for too long. Like, don’t they even know that before Christianity the Goddess was a Woman and men were but her consorts? Don’t they even know that women have Divine Feminine Power which comes from their uteruses or something, and that’s why we should keep them clean with abortions? Quick, let’s form a goddess circle and read Alice Walker novels out loud!
Okay, but seriously: Sandra Fluke is the face of the War on Women, and it’s that imaginary war between female autonomy and the Republican party that won the Democrats the election. It is my opinion that, other than the candidates themselves, no other single person had a more profound effect on the 2012 presidential election than Sandra Fluke.
Truth is, it could have been almost any articulate single woman playing Fluke’s role, but for whatever reason, she got the part, and she played it well.
2. Sandra Fluke embodies the times. She is at the very least a captain in what my husband calls the Free S**t Army. For Democrats, gone are the days of “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Say that to people in the Free S**t Army, and they cock their heads to the side quizzically, like a confused puppy, and demand their free cell phone.
Speaking of which, the number of people receiving some type of federal assistance is growing exponentially. The Democrats have presented themselves as the party of the poor, but it makes you wonder: if poor people vote for Democrats, do you think Democrats would want fewer poor people, or more?
Government assistance like food stamps and WIC is designed to help people for a short period of time, to get a leg up so they can start supporting themselves, to get out of a hole. Instead, we have families in which generations have been on welfare. We have too many people who have learned how to work the system. A few months ago I was in an urgent care clinic being seen for tonsilitis. When I went to pay, the young woman in front of me had expensive hair extensions, designer jeans, a designer purse, and an elaborate manicure – all things I could not, on my salary, afford. When the woman behind the counter asked for payment, she presented…a Medicaid card.
Sandra Fluke may be less ghetto fabulous, but she is the same thing. She can somehow afford to go to Georgetown University, but she can’t afford $9 a month for birth control pills? Of course she can. But that’s not the point. The point is, as Center for Reproductive Rights president Nancy Northup said when discussing abortion, that a right you can’t access is not a right at all. If you can’t afford birth control pills, then you may as well not have a right to them! If you can’t afford health care, that’s the same as not being allowed to receive it!
To that end, I would hereby like to petition the federal government for a free car. Because if I don’t have free transportation, how on earth can you say I have the right to transportation? Also, how can you say I have the right to own guns unless you buy me one? President Obama, I hereby demand that you forthwith begin making my truck payment! Also, more weapons!
CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!
Being allowed something is not the same thing as being entitled to it. Except now, in America, I guess it is. And who represents that better than Sandra Fluke?
1. If she is named Person of the Year, Sandra Fluke will join the ranks of other really embarrassing Persons of the Year: Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin (twice!), Bill Clinton (also twice!), and, in 1988, “The Endangered Earth.” Puh-leez.
If Josef Stalin can kill millions of people and be Person of the Year, Sandra Fluke should not be disqualified for convincing millions of women that it’s empowering to demand free stuff from people.
LifeNews.com Note: Kristen Walker is Vice President of New Wave Feminists.This post originally appeared at the Live Action blog and is reprinted with permission.
