CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Several days before Sept. 11, 2001, one of the worst examples of human bad behavior was unfolding in Northern Ireland. Men, supposed adults, were having a great time chasing little Catholic girls down the street.
These brave guys and stalwarts of the Protestant faith were bullying grade school children, not high school girls. I am sure that after they sent those little uniformed girls flying into their schoolyard, the taller ones went down to the pub and entertained each other with how well they terrified the short ones. Onward Christian soldiers!
Then Sept. 11 exploded. Our attentions had to move in a million different directions, but differences in religion and the treatment of women are still being thrashed out even to this very minute.
Today, Republican males want to dictate to all women, not just Republican women, about birth control. Most of these same Republican men do not want to spend a dime for children from the moment of birth. Logic would argue these men would support the use of birth control. But logic is totally absent from their arguments.
A man who would be president, Rick Santorum, believes that rates of teen pregnancies will miraculously go down if teens are denied birth control. Yes, you read that correctly: denied birth control.
A man who makes millions making fun of women, Rush Limbaugh, twisted logic on its head when he abused a young law student. A young law student, Sandra Fluke, exercised her First Amendment rights and explained that women at her Catholic college could not get birth control through the student health plan.
Rush distorted her argument. Fluke wanted members of Congress to realize that Catholic school officials dictated that birth control would not be included in the student health plan. Keep in mind that through their student fees, students pay into health programs.
But Rush, the logic-twister, took her point and came up with this: she wanted to be paid to have sex. Of course, reasonable people know that was not her argument. But Rush the unreasonable has been taking shots at women from the first day he went on the air as a "conservative commentator."
Maybe that's where he got the idea he should get hooked on drugs, too. You know the thinking: I'm a multi-million dollar entertainer. Don't all multi-million dollar entertainers use drugs? Rush certainly did. When he was arrested, prosecutors said he loved Oxycontin, Lorcat, Norco and hydrocodone.
When he was first arrested, Rush was also accused of sending his maid out to buy his pills. Does this mean that he was prostituting himself by paying someone to bring home his beloved pills?
His drug arrest came after his 1995 TV rant that "Too many whites are getting away with drug use." I know. The doctor-shopping charges were dropped, and Rush never went to jail. He promised to go to rehab.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Several days before Sept. 11, 2001, one of the worst examples of human bad behavior was unfolding in Northern Ireland. Men, supposed adults, were having a great time chasing little Catholic girls down the street.
These brave guys and stalwarts of the Protestant faith were bullying grade school children, not high school girls. I am sure that after they sent those little uniformed girls flying into their schoolyard, the taller ones went down to the pub and entertained each other with how well they terrified the short ones. Onward Christian soldiers!
Then Sept. 11 exploded. Our attentions had to move in a million different directions, but differences in religion and the treatment of women are still being thrashed out even to this very minute.
Today, Republican males want to dictate to all women, not just Republican women, about birth control. Most of these same Republican men do not want to spend a dime for children from the moment of birth. Logic would argue these men would support the use of birth control. But logic is totally absent from their arguments.
A man who would be president, Rick Santorum, believes that rates of teen pregnancies will miraculously go down if teens are denied birth control. Yes, you read that correctly: denied birth control.
A man who makes millions making fun of women, Rush Limbaugh, twisted logic on its head when he abused a young law student. A young law student, Sandra Fluke, exercised her First Amendment rights and explained that women at her Catholic college could not get birth control through the student health plan.
Rush distorted her argument. Fluke wanted members of Congress to realize that Catholic school officials dictated that birth control would not be included in the student health plan. Keep in mind that through their student fees, students pay into health programs.
But Rush, the logic-twister, took her point and came up with this: she wanted to be paid to have sex. Of course, reasonable people know that was not her argument. But Rush the unreasonable has been taking shots at women from the first day he went on the air as a "conservative commentator."
Maybe that's where he got the idea he should get hooked on drugs, too. You know the thinking: I'm a multi-million dollar entertainer. Don't all multi-million dollar entertainers use drugs? Rush certainly did. When he was arrested, prosecutors said he loved Oxycontin, Lorcat, Norco and hydrocodone.
When he was first arrested, Rush was also accused of sending his maid out to buy his pills. Does this mean that he was prostituting himself by paying someone to bring home his beloved pills?
His drug arrest came after his 1995 TV rant that "Too many whites are getting away with drug use." I know. The doctor-shopping charges were dropped, and Rush never went to jail. He promised to go to rehab.
And besides, that's in his past. Like the fact he flunked out of college. Maybe that's why he wanted to attack a successful law student. If his bio on Wikipedia is to believed, Rush's mother said, "He flunked everything."
We can only hope that he could now pass a urine test -- the kind conservatives want all people on welfare to undergo. We can pray that he has broken free of the Devil's addiction to those powerful pills. But he clearly remains addicted to still another powerful drug: nicotine. But I am sure a cigar is only a cigar.
Rush is my age. That means he would have been eligible to serve his country in the killing fields of Vietnam. But, of course, he did not go. His last draft status was 4F for his painful Pilonidal cyst. They must be catching because he gives me a pain in the cyst.
Rush, of all people, should have paid more attention to what Fluke in fact said. She pointed out that a friend with an ovarian cyst had to have her ovary removed because her insurance would not pay for birth control pills that might have stopped the growth of the cyst.
But he ignored all of her testimony. Instead, he revealed his deepest sexual desires. He wants to watch Fluke have sex. Maybe that is why he is working on his fourth wife.
As everyone knows by now, Rush also called Fluke a prostitute, and his advertisers dropped his show. But I hope Fluke sues him, and she can call his income her own.
Now I would be the last to speak out about someone's disability. Heaven forbid! The fact that he is legally deaf is sad. But it is more evidence that he will not listen to reason or his fellow women.
So an overweight deaf guy who flunked out of college and never served in Vietnam where so many of his generation did gets addicted to painkillers and engages in serial marriages. He makes himself feel better about being a fat loser by calling women names like "feminazi." This chapter in his career may someday be compared to the moment when McCarthyism crumbled. "Have you no sense of decency?"
I wish I was making him up.
I wish his mother could exercise retroactive birth control.
Williams is a staff writer who can be reached at 304-348-5112.
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