Well, old Rush sure put his foot squarely into it this time.
That would be his mouth, of course: The iconic conservative talker aimed an over-the-air insult at a Georgetown Law School feminist activist — converting her overnight into the Democratic Party’s latest star.
Not since Cindy Sheehan has the party — and its media handmaidens — had such a superficially sympathetic “victim” to exploit.
But the hoopla obscures the real issue — which is not the supposed GOP “war on women” but rather the Obama administration’s assault on religious freedom and personal conscience.
Limbaugh’s gaffe — it shall not be repeated here — invited the mainstream media to portray Sandra Fluke as an innocent young student slandered by a broadcasting bully rather than the hard-eyed, hyper-entitled 30-year-old radical feminist activist that she is.
Fact is, Fluke has acknowledged that she enrolled at Georgetown precisely to challenge the Catholic university’s refusal to include contraception in its student health coverage.
She’s stretching her 15 minutes to the limit, and Democrats are flogging the incident mightily — from President Obama’s phone call to her to House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer urging her to sue Limbaugh.
But what about the real issue?
The demand that religious institutions be forced to pay for health procedures and practices that do violence to their core beliefs — the essence of the ObamaCare mandate — is abhorrent to the First Amendment. People of conscience should oppose such directives in all their forms.
As Timothy Cardinal Dolan and the US Conference of Bishops rightly put it: “What about forcing individual believers to pay for what violates their religious freedom and conscience? . . . [T]here was not even a nod to the deeper concerns about trespassing upon religious freedom . . .”
In fact, when the bishops took up a White House invitation to “work out the wrinkles,” they were told that any discussion of “the broader concerns of religious freedom” was “off the table.”
As for the suggestion that the real issue is women’s health, Dolan declared: “We will not let this deception stand.”
Nor should he.
Government has no right to force religious institutions to violate their conscience. Plain and simple.
Limbaugh’s gibe, again, certainly obscures that point. But it’s no less valid — and compelling — because of it.