Sandra Fluke for Time Magazine Person of the Year?

By Greg Campbell
TPNN Staff

Charles Lindbergh, Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Sandra Fluke? That doesn’t sound right…

TIME Magazine is currently weighing who will be their next “Person of the Year” and somehow, Sandra Fluke has made it into the running.

The once-influential magazine is mulling over several candidates, but the fact that Fluke has garnered any serious contemplation is a sign that in a modern American society saturated with Kardashians and Hilton heiresses, it doesn’t take much to be thought of as famous or influential.

Fluke, a Georgetown law student, is most famous for, to put it simply, her crusade to get you and I to pay for her birth control. She became a poster-child for the mythical GOP “War on Women” as the left was able to paint an opposition to publicly-funded birth control as being somehow anti-women.

Dennis Miller succinctly summarized Sandra Fluke’s position by saying,

“She’s 30, for God’s sake. She’s still in school. She wants me to kick in ten bucks a month for her birth control. Here, I’ll give you ten, just shut up for a second!”

According to TIME,

“The daughter of a conservative Christian pastor, Sandra Fluke, 31, became a women’s-rights activist in college and continued her advocacy as a law student at Georgetown. After she complained about being denied a chance to testify at a Republican-run House hearing on insurance coverage for birth control, Rush Limbaugh called Fluke a ‘slut.’ Democrats and many Republicans reacted with outrage, and the left made Limbaugh’s slur Exhibit A in what they called a GOP ‘war on women.’ Fluke, meanwhile, weathered the attention with poise and maturity and emerged as a political celebrity. Democrats gave her a national-convention speaking slot as part of their push to make reproductive rights a central issue in the 2012 presidential campaign — one that helped Barack Obama trounce Mitt Romney among single women on Election Day.”

A “women’s-rights activist”? No, Susan B. Anthony was a women’s-rights activist. Sandra Fluke is a woman in her thirties that believes that her love life should be financially supported by taxpayers and her university.

Furthermore, I refuse to accept the quest to get publicly-funded birth control as a “reproductive rights” issue. Nobody is challenging the right to reproduce or not reproduce; we are challenging the baseless assumption that people have a basic right to make the consequences of their life decisions shared by society.

One of the best explanations for this whole issue I have heard yet was summarized thusly: If your employer (or university) refuses to offer to feed you, they are not “denying you access to food.” They’re just not providing it. Likewise, if they refuse to provide you contraception, they are, similarly, not denying you access to it.

I’m all for valuing political heroes or celebrities, but let’s hope TIME Magazine gains some perspective and raises the bar quite a bit.