By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Seems the far Right just can’t stay out of – or quit throwing – the muck. The Huffington Post reports that University of Rochester econ professor, Steve Landsburg, has launched his own attack on Georgetown law school student, Sandra Fluke, who had the temerity to speak her mind to a congressional committee discussing contraceptive services. Landsburg apparently dabbles in English grammar when his dismal graphs and computer models become tiresome. In his off-hours, he seems quite content to edit Rush Limbaugh’s right-wing attack pieces, adding some of his own insights. On his blog he felt compelled to share:
[Limbaugh] wants to brand Ms. Fluke a “slut” because, he says, she’s demanding to be paid for sex. There are two things wrong here. First, the word “slut” connotes (to me at least) precisely the sort of joyous enthusiasm that would render payment superfluous. A far better word might have been “prostitute” (or a five-letter synonym therefor), but that’s still wrong because Ms. Fluke is not in fact demanding to be paid for sex. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) She will, as I understand it, be having sex whether she gets paid or not. Her demand is to be paid. The right word for that is something much closer to “extortionist”. Or better yet, “extortionist with an overweening sense of entitlement.” Is there a single word for that?
But whether or not he chose the right word, what I just don’t get is why the pro-respect crowd is aiming all its fire at Rush. Which is more disrespectful — his harsh language or Sandra Fluke’s attempt to pick your pocket?
Seems he may be on to something etymologically speaking but he fails
miserably in the free speech/separation of church-state class. I’d think he’s also getting a “D-” for comprehension in my class. Fluke made no claim on the public funds and instead merely advocated that private insurance cover contraceptive services to further women’s health rather than cater to religious convictions of a particular sect.
While Professor Landsburg doesn’t get it, the University’s students did. Thirty of them dressed in black and made a rather dramatic entry into his classroom passing out summaries of the professor’s musings and then opted to stand between him and his charges staging a pedagogical wall of separation between scorn and student.
Landsburg called security to disband the protest, but the students left of their own accord making their point for both civility and free speech. “We are appalled by how often women and their bodies have been used for political theatrics, and we refuse to remain passive on this issue,” Kelly Rickert, a Rochester student who was a part of the protest, told The Huffington Post. “To do so would be to condone the actions of Professor Landsburg.”
University of Rochester President Joel Seligman acknowledged his employee’s right to the academic freedom to express unpopular opinions but added:
“I am outraged that any professor would demean a student in this fashion,” Seligman said in a statement. “To openly ridicule, mock, or jeer a student in this way is about the most offensive thing a professor can do. We are here to educate, to nurture, to inspire, not to engage in character assassination.”
Well, Dr. Segilman some of you are. On the other hand, seems some in the ivory tower like to attack from the comfort of their office. Landsburg was undeterred, “[Fluke] deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered,” and “Rush stepped in to provide the requisite mockery” with a “spot-on analogy.” And in one of the most ironic statements I’ve heard from the academe in a long time said of the protestors, “in their contempt for the free exchange of ideas, they appear to be comrades-in-arms of Sandra Fluke.”
Comrades-in-arms by personal ridicule and thus chilling the free speech of another? In Rochester, it seems it takes one to know one.
In keeping with our academic theme, in a hundred words or less, pick the victim(s) and defend your answer:
a. Sandra Fluke
b. Professor Steve Landsburg
c. The University of Rochester
d. First Amendment
e. Academic Freedom
Source: Huffington Post
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
As Rush Limbaugh ‘Slut’ Comment Catches Appeal Amongst Academics, a Defense of Women is Necessary
Erin Crossett
http://www.policymic.com/articles/5149/as-rush-limbaugh-slut-comment-catches-appeal-amongst-academics-a-defense-of-women-is-necessary
In response to Rush Limbaugh’s outrageous and unsubstantiated comments regarding Georgetown Law student and women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke, University of Rochester economist Steven Landsburg weighs in in a manner consistent with the GOP discourse on women’s health. Rather than credibly debate Fluke’s stance on mandated subsidized contraception as a preventative to polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis, and other reproductive diseases, Landsburg equates Fluke to an extortionist, pick-pocketer, and wholly undermines the burdens that fall on everyday women, not men.
“But while Ms. Fluke herself deserves the same basic respect we owe to any human being, her position — which is what’s an issue here — deserves none whatsoever. It deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked, and jeered.”
In his typical appeal to the shock factor, my former economics professor attempts to illustrate logical inconsistencies in Fluke’s reasoning while missing her position almost entirely. Landsburg, like Limbaugh, Santorum, Gingrich, and innumerable upper-middle class, white male GOP figureheads, marginalizes the powerful, articulate statements of women around the country by labeling those in support of subsidized contraception, and general access to health care, as prostitutes, whores, or extortionists.
“All she said, in effect, is that she and others want contraception and they don’t want to pay for it,” Landsburg said.
Is that all she said, Landsburg? It is not that they don’t want to pay for contraception, but that they can’t afford to pay for contraception. Not once in her written testament to the House did Fluke mention sex, for herself or for others (though even if she did, I still would never equate that with prostitution or extortion). Fluke is merely drawing attention to a terrifying reality in today’s day and age: that women around the country are being denied access to physical and emotional well being on account of their gender.
I am tired of defending my right to live a healthy and productive life, much less to a man who is supposed to be an educator and to other men who are vying to run my country. Concerns by women, particularly low-income women, women working for religiously affiliated institutions, women pursuing higher education at religiously affiliated institutions, are real. Sandra Fluke spoke truth to power in defense of these women and their bodies, and now her testimony is being cast aside so Steven Landsburg and Republicans alike can take advantage of their prominent position and access to a mouthpiece to propagate their typical ad hominem dialogue. I expect wingnut conservatives like Limbaugh to engage in this behavior, but I expect far more from a prominent academic.
What follows the first link in the 8:34 comment is the entirely of Abby Zimet’s posting.
On the heels of Amy Tan’s piece (posted by Woosty… thanks):
3.19.12
On Righteous Right-Wingers Who Insist On Telling the Rest of Us How To Live
by Abby Zimet
http://www.commondreams.org/further/2012/03/19-3
Michael Kobulnicky, 50, a leader in the San Diego Tea Party, was arrested last week for allegedly kidnapping and raping a woman on Fiesta Island. Tennessee’s GOP Rep. David Hawk, a “pro-life” activist who tried to get a bill passed allowing guns in bars, was arrested Sunday for domestic assault after his wife said he struck her and knocked her to the floor. His co-sponsor for the gun bill was arrested last year for Driving Under the Influence – with a gun. Etc etc. ‘Nuff said.”
http://www.commondreams.org/sites/commondreams.org/files/imce-images/family_values_tumblr_lzr2rgkpri1r9m8meo1_400.jpg
Woosty,
Thanks for Amy. Like your avatar. New? Sent as info to friends over there.
Guess we can thank ALEC for this.
The state repubs got a menu from ALEC, and then it was only a matter of choosing which they thought were most evil, coordinate, and “do it, boys”.
“We’ll show those darn women, who wears the pants in this family. And who takes the Viagra too. Har har har. Yahoo!. We’ll take the pill from ’em and teach them what every god-fearing woman knows—-her proper place. Ol’ timey religion rules, as my kids say.”
Excerpt heard around certain legislatures.
Good work Elaine..
OT:
Tennessee Abortion Bill Would Make Abortion Providers’ Names Public
by Laura Bassett
Posted: 03/19/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/19/tennessee-abortion-bill_n_1363410.html
Excerpt:
“A new bill moving through the Tennessee House of Representatives would require the state to publish the names of each doctor who performs an abortion and detailed statistics about the woman having the procedure, which opponents worry will spur anti-abortion violence in the state.
The Life Defense Act of 2012, sponsored by state Rep. Matthew Hill (R-Jonesboro), mandates that the Tennessee Department of Health make detailed demographic information about every woman who has an abortion available to the public, including her age, race, county, marital status, education level, number of children, the location of the procedure and how many times she has been pregnant. Each report would also have to include the name of the doctor who performed the procedure.
Several health organizations, including the Tennessee Medical Association and Planned Parenthood, are concerned that the bill will make doctors and women vulnerable to attacks, especially considering the murder of Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas abortion provider, by an anti-abortion activist in 2009.”
I agree Elaine. Very troubling.
Woosty and Elaine, Excellent postings.
AY,
I was fortunate to teach where I did. I worked with exceptional educators and taught hundreds of wonderful students over the course of more than three decades. I had a truly rewarding career.
*****
rafflaw,
Our country is regressing–not moving forward. I never thought I’d experience what we are seeing today in this country with all these misogynistic anti-women bills. It is truly disheartening.
LK,
Thanks for your input….
Elaine,
Thank you for everything you do and the invaluable information you provide….. The children that you taught were very fortunate to have someone like you….
Elaine,
The rest of the world would be correct.
10 Reasons the Rest of the World Thinks the U.S. Is Nuts
Soraya Chemaly–Feminist, Satirist, and Media Critic
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/womens-reproductive-rights_b_1345214.html
Excerpt:
The rest of the civilized world thinks this country has lost its mind. It’s no wonder. Look at this list of frenzied misogyny:
1. Making women carry still-born fetuses to full term because cows and pigs do. This week, Mr England, you supported a bill, the net effect of which, taken tandem with other restrictions, will result in doctors and women being unable to make private, medically-based, critical care decisions and some women being effectively forced to carry their dead or dying fetuses. Women are different from farm animals, Mr. England, and this bill, requiring a woman to carry a dead or dying fetus, with no possibility of abortion, even when the she is in danger of dying, is inhumane and unethical. By forcing a woman to do this, you are violating her right not to be subjected to inhuman treatment and tortured. And, yes, involuntarily carrying a dead fetus to term, although not torture to you or to a pig, is torture for a woman. It is also a violation of her bodily integrity and a threat to her life and as such violates her right to life.
2. Consigning women to death to save a fetus. Abortions save women’s lives. “Let women die” bills are happening all over the country. There is no simple or pretty way to put this. Every day, all over the world, women die because they do not have access to safe abortions. Yet, here we are, returning to the dark ages of maternal sacrifice. Do really have to type this sentence: this is a violation of women’s fundamental right to life.
3. Criminalizing pregnancy and miscarriages and arresting, imprisoning and charging women who miscarry with murder, like Rennie Gibbs in Mississippi or at least 40 other similar cases in Alabama or like Bei Bei Shuai, a woman who is now imprisoned, is charged with murder after trying to commit suicide while pregnant. Pregnant women are becoming a special class subject to “special” laws that infringe on their fundamental rights.
4. Forcing women to undergo involuntary vaginal penetration (otherwise called rape) with a condom-covered, six- to eight-inch ultrasound probe. Pennsylvania is currently considering that option along with eleven other states. Trans-vaginal ultrasounds undertaken with out a woman’s consent are rape according the legal definition of the word. This violates a woman’s bodily integrity and also constitutes torture when used, as states are suggesting, as a form of control and oppression. Women have the right not to be raped by the state.
5. Disabling women or sacrificing their lives by either withholding medical treatment or forcing women to undergo involuntary medical procedures. We impose an unequal obligation on women to sacrifice their bodily integrity for another. For example, as in Tysiac v. Poland, in which a mother of two, became blind after her doctor refused to perform an abortion that she wanted that would have halted the course of a degenerative eye disease. If my newborn baby is in need of a kidney and you have a spare matching one, can I enact legislation that says the state can take yours and give it to her? No. We do not force people to donate their organs to benefit others, even those who have already been born. One of the most fundamental of all human rights is that humans be treated equally before the law. Denying a woman this right is a violation of her equal right to this protection.
6. Giving zygotes “personhood” rights while systematically stripping women of their fundamental rights. There is too much to say about the danger of personhood ideas creeping into health policy to do it here. But, consider what happens to a woman whose womb is not considered the “best” environment for a gestating fetus in a world of personhood-for-zygote legislation: who decides the best environment — the state, her insurance company, her employer, her rapist who decides he really, really wants to be a father? Anyone but a woman.
7. Inhibiting, humiliating and punishing women for their choices to have an abortion for any reason by levying taxes specifically on abortion, including abortions sought by rape victims to end their involuntary insemination, imposing restrictive requirements like 24 hour wait periods and empowering doctors to lie to female patients about their fetuses in order to avoid prosecution. In Arizona, Kansas, Texas, Virginia, Colorado, Arkansas and other states around the country bills that make women “pay” for their choices are abounding.
8. Allowing employers to delve into women’s private lives and only pay for insurance when they agree, for religious reasons, with how she choses to use birth control. In Arizona, which introduced such a bill this week, this means covering payment for birth control as a benefit only when a woman has proven that she will not use it to control her own reproduction (ie. as birth control). As much as I am worried about women and families in Arizona though, I am more worried about those in Alabama. You see, as recently revealed in a public policy poll in Alabama, conservative, evangelicals who support “personhood” related “pro-life” legislation and are fighting for their “religious liberty” — 21 percent think interracial marriage should be illegal. So, what if they decide that an employee involved in an interracial marriage should not, by divine mandate, reproduce? Do they switch and provide birth control for this employee? Do they make contraception a necessary term of employment for people in interracial marriages? This violates a woman’s right to privacy. My womb is one million times more private than your bedrooms, gentlemen.
9. Sacrificing women’s overall health and the well-being of their families in order to stop them from exercising their fundamental human right to control their own bodies and reproduction. Texas just did that when it turned down $35million dollars in federal funds thereby ensuring that 300,000 low-income and uninsured Texas women will have no or greatly-reduced access to basic preventive and reproductive health care.
10. Depriving women of their ability to earn a living and support themselves and their families. Bills, like this one in Arizona, allow employers to fire women for using contraception. Women like these are being fired for not.
New memo lists 31 advertisers who requested ‘not to be scheduled in any Rush Limbaugh program’ | Radio-info.com reports that Cumulus Media/ESPN has distrubuted a list of 31 advertisers “who requested that their commercials not be scheduled in any Rush Limbaugh programs.” Cumulus, the second largest U.S. radio network, carries Limbaugh on 40 of its stations. The full list of 31 advertisers is unknown. The memo is separate from a list of 96 advertisers who don’t want to advertise on Limbaugh which was reported exclusively last week by ThinkProgress. That memo was distributed by Limbaugh’s largest radio network, Premiere.
http://thinkprogress.org/media/2012/03/19/447596/new-memo-lists-31-advertisers-who-requested-not-to-be-scheduled-in-any-rush-limbaugh-program/
[don’t know for sure if Amy Tan wrote this but ….]
The wonderful writer Amy Tan has posted this statement:
To those who criticize my perversion of the GOP candidates’ names, please know that name-calling is not my usual standard of response. Nor do I normally use expletives. But I make exceptions. Never in my lifetime have I seen such a line-up of candidates who want to pervert the lives of women, who want to f**k them over every which way they can think of. These perverts are men, and variously they are telling us that single women should not have sex, should not use contraceptives, should consider a baby conceived from a rape to be a blessing, and to leave all matters concerning their uterus to them. They say that contraceptives for women make it too easy for them to “do things.” They do not offer the same opinions on men and their tendencies to “do things.” Their rhetoric makes it sound like women are wanton spirits who must be controlled. I am a writer because I have strong opinions. Those opinions on women’s rights come from my grandmother, who was raped, and my mother, who was raped at gunpoint by her husband, and who was jailed when she ran away from him. My mother told me as a child and a grownup, that no one should ever tell me whether I should have a baby. How could I be any other kind of writer, any other kind of person? How could I not protest the perversion of women’s rights espoused by these candidates? The twisted names I give them may sound “hurtful” –as name-calling is. But the hurt they would give us would not be temporary slights, but permanent scars. This country is not divided because of Obama. It has been divided for a long time by the Republican Right who vote down the line on personal moral beliefs. They are out of touch with the actual governance of this country and its relation to the larger world. Would these candidates cut off relations with China until China abolishes the one-child policy? I was born the daughter of a Baptist minister. I know how intractable religious beliefs are supposed to be, how by faith, you must carry those beliefs into the world, into all walks of life, without compromise, without listening to any other opinions. By that faith, you save who you can and smite who you can’t. To these GOP candidates who want to rule government by the divine guidance of their cocks, study the pages of history on the Inquisition and the Holocaust, and keep your hands off me, my nieces, my sisters, my women friends, their daughters and their daughters to come.
I707,
Play the victim game….apparently this too is good for you… If I recall I was victimized and responded…. Just as you are now…. But you see to it to call someone out other than yourself…. How’s that sock fit? Can’t wait for the reply…..
Lotta,
Thanks for your time. An attack on my integrity by saying I am trying to deceive others into to “falling” into something I laid out was bad to hear.
I still don’t know what your first paragraph in your comment now really means
I guess I may be close but saying I understand it to mean “don’t get involved in others quarrels”. A common sense rule I still haven’t learned to practice, as you see.
As it was AY I was demeaning and you included him/her with SwM, with whom I have a good relationship, implied to me that you were siding with him, and that I was the troublemaker.
Was simply searching out him for revenge, no more. Which is definitliy impossible with AY.
Apology warmly accepted. Gracious of you. Thanks.
Idealist, I was attempting to warn you off getting in the middle of something or inadvertently stirring up something by bringing an appeal/insult regarding a current dispute you may have, to either one of the parties directly involved in a past dispute. It smacks of goading which won’t work.
Perhaps you just stumbled into an old conflict and I read too much into it. I can go with that, having done it myself on occasion. 🙂
I sincerely apologise for linking you to motives not yours and causing you distress over it.
anon:
“You did, when you suggest a reasonable response to his blog post is the disruption of the class times of his 200 students.”
************************
Like I said, you’re free to speak and others are free to show displeasue. No one’s immune from criticism, and no one tried to restrict Landsburg once he made those stupid comments. He’s still at today on his blog though he seems a tad remorseful.
Disrupt the class for 15 minutes? Please…. I’ve been in many an undergraduate econ class and a display like this is a welcome relief from the incessant droning on and on about supply and demand charts. I notice no students demanded their money back for that day, much to the chagrin of our Right-Wing pundits. Maybe they’ll find a stooge among the College Republicans. I’d happily contribute to the fund to pay him. What can this econ prof be worth at the University of Rochester? Fifty bucks and hour maybe.
And what have you done´in the way of military service?
None I presume.
I finished at the top of 25 other officers at sig off school.. And maintained high annual reviews, got offered but declined exec officer post, and was discharged 7 years after active service, without a blemish. You can’t in fact say shit about me. So, your crap is just that, crap.
But that’s your style, baseless personal attacks.
Stand at ease, soldier, if you were one.