The Democratic "War on Women"

It is generally considered impolitic to question motives, the assumption being that while policies may differ, one’s political adversaries are still guided by the purest of intentions, however misguided their policies may be. 

The assumption is tested though when one side regularly accuses the other of the most heinous of crimes with ease and constancy such that it is now inferred that Republicans favor dirty air and water and tossing granny off the cliff or that the Republican Presidential nominee is a tax cheat and apparently a murderer as well.

And so as the bounds of civil discourse erode, divining motives becomes, it seems, fair game.  What, for example, are we to make of the well-oiled claim by Democrats pertaining to the Republican “War on Women?” 

Do Democrats believe that Republicans have declared war on their wives, mothers, and daughters?  Or women that are prolife?  Or married, stay at home Moms?  Or women vainly seeking jobs in the Obama economy? 

(Who wages war on them if not the central planners neutering the private economy?) 

Or female “millionaires and billionaires”?

Or women concerned with the mounting debt?

Or any of the overwhelming majority of women in America who do not consider free condoms an urgent priority? 

Or can we say that the so-called “war on women” is in reality nothing more than a disagreement with a tiny, freakish element within the Democratic Party?

Democrats have decided that the key issue for women, above all else, above jobs, education, and the economy, above rising fuel and food costs, exploding entitlements, runaway spending, and national security, is free contraception.  Not just access to contraceptives, mind you, which they already have, but that someone else pay for them.  And not just taxpayer funded contraception but abortifacients and abortion as well, including right up to the moment of delivery.  

Is it the view, then, of liberal Democrats (who pride themselves as feminist champions) that women care about nothing so much as shutting down their reproductive organs?  That after all the progress women have made in the last century, the bracing reality of women going off to college, entering the work force, making important contributions to the life of the country, in business and culture, in politics and science, medicine and law, and elsewhere, that in the end, for liberals, women still devolve down basically to a pair of ovaries and a uterus? 

Women, in general, care for the same things men do: jobs, family, the economy, education, and the future of the country.  Free contraception, other than for a small, dense coterie of hard-core feminists, probably registers little at all among most women who already have access to birth control at reasonable cost, as, indeed, they have for decades – and under both Democratic and Republican administrations. 

Yet the Democratic Party, with a patronizing view of the fairer sex, seem to believe that women hanker for just this crusade, that women place free contraception as among their highest priorities, that waving the banner of free birth control pills in an election year is an effective albeit mindless campaign tactic to lure the female vote, that women, after all, are apparently frivolous creatures concerned foremost with things below the waist – and little else.

Which brings us to Sandra Fluke, the “reproductive rights” activist” and a featured speaker at the Democratic Convention.  Fluke, 31, who graduated from Georgetown Law, one of the top law schools in the country, at a cost of $50,000 a year (she had already received a BS in Gender, Feminist, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell), will enter an attractive profession with a starting salary of some $160,000 a year; she, like many of her peers, is blessed to be born in a nation where promising, young women can nurture their talents, receive elite educations, and enjoy lucrative careers of their choosing – and, if they're lucky, give speeches before a national audience. 

And so did Ms. Fluke use the occasion to attest to the wonders of life for women in America (of which she is a prime example) and to stand for oppressed women around the world? Or to expound on the horrors of womanhood, say, in places like Iran, the Sudan, or Saudi Arabia where girls may be beaten, tortured, and executed for minor offenses, often by their own families, with little recourse to justice; where women must accept carefully defined, limited roles, second class status, and enjoy none of the rights, protections, and opportunities taken for granted by women in America?

Well, no. 

Ms. Fluke, instead, with no sense of irony, a child of privilege and fortune, a beneficiary of this most tolerant of nations, a recipient of a quarter million dollars worth of posh education, before an audience of millions, spoke of the medieval agony of life for females - not in the Middle East, North Korea, or China, say - but right here in this country, in the United States, a dark, brutish place, after all, particularly under Republican Presidents; and that there existed no greater urgency for the country (and its women), the most indebted nation on earth, teetering on another recession, confronted by a multitude of threats and looming disasters, than to provide 31 year old pampered, self-obsessed, witless nymphets like her with free contraceptives, all paid for, of course, by you. 

It is the perfect metaphor for today’s Democratic Party.  From the Party that liberated Europe, defeated the Japanese, and contained the Soviets - to the Party of free condoms. 

It does not get more pathetic than this.