The American Spectator

Now that the media feeding frenzy has calmed at least for a bit, it’s worth saying that we’ve missed the whole point on Mizz Sandra Fluke. Fluke is the Georgetown Law School student who testified against the religious right of her school to refuse to pay for contraception because to do so would violate its religious principles.

It’s titillating — but irrelevant — to speculate about Fluke’s sexually promiscuity. To try to characterize her as Rush Limbaugh did could be accurate but isn’t connected to the political issue at hand.

Sandra Fluke is a welfare queen. Remember, back in the 1980s, the image of the welfare queen? It was a caricature of a woman on welfare who had borne many children for men who she knew little or not at all. The welfare queen made an industry of producing children because she knew the state would pay her to do so, and pay for her children’s needs from food to clothes to medical care.

Sandra Fluke is the model Welfare Queen for the 21st Century. Upper middle class to start, going to a very expensive (and very liberal law) school on scholarship, and now (as we know from news reports) a tool of the White House media shop. She won’t have kids like the old-style welfare queens. Instead, she will first absorb all the government benefits she can while in school, and then work for a liberal law firm or political organization as a political activist. Or she may become another trusted lieutenant of Eric Holder at Justice. She is a product of the American version of the cradle-through-career indoctrination and career of the old Soviet Komsomol.

Welfare Queen Fluke will never produce anything of value to society. She will fit easily into the industry of regulation, bigger government, and reduced personal freedoms. She believes everything she wants — birth control, abortion, whatever — is an entitlement for which the government must pay. The welfare queens of the 1980s were small-timers. Welfare Queen Fluke and her ilk are an existential threat to fiscal responsibility. Just think about how many thousands of them are graduating this year to enter government jobs or political campaigns. They will be spreading their ideas to all within hearing.