The Democrats’ Bleak Concept Of Personal Freedom
Mark Steyn writes that the problem with Sandra Fluke is that her entitlement-mongering is all too common in the American electorate.
Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices” — and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn’t seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their “voices” ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over “our bodies” and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for “our” pancreases and “our” bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of “personal freedom.”
Fluke, and most of our friends on the left, would argue that absent an entitlement for contraception they are being denied access to contraception. If a Catholic-owned business refuses to pay for contraception, which they find sinful, then the left would have us believe that Catholics are denying Americans access to contraception.
I guess, then, that vegetarian restaurants are denying us access to meat if they won’t make us a ham sandwich.
Your freedom cannot impose a mortgage upon someone else’s prosperity or beliefs. Your freedom cannot eclipse another’s freedom, because then it is not freedom at all. Freedom means being free to provide for yourself, not demanding that others provide for you.
Tags: freedom, sandra fluke
