It's a Mad, Mad World

As of last Monday, gas prices (which were $1.70 when Bush left office) sat at a national average of $3.79, which is the highest seasonally adjusted price in American history. In three states the average already exceeds not only $4.00, but $4.20, while five more states are about to reach the $4.00 threshold...Yet Barack Obama is doing nothing to address the conditions causing this, and is in fact making things worse with asinine moves like killing the Keystone pipeline, red-lighting federal oil leases, and keeping Stephen Chu in office.

Iran is hurtling full speed ahead to attain nuclear weapons, and may already have them...Yet Obama (who once referred to Iran's ayatollah as "the supreme leader") is doing nothing to stop them. In fact, he is trying to discourage anyone else from stopping them.

He is so blatantly unfriendly to our most important ally (Israel) that even the family members of the Democratic National Committee's chairwoman don't believe him when he says otherwise.

He recently raised his middle finger to the Catholic Church, of which nearly one of every four Americans is a member. And in so doing, he displayed his contempt for the notion of religious liberty -- a notion that was the very reason the Pilgrims crossed the ocean to plant the seeds of our nation.

In short, there are many grave issues with far-reaching consequences facing us right now. However, the topic everyone seems most energized by is the utterly ridiculous flap surrounding Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke. On the one hand, I don't want to talk about that flap because it is so absurd; but on the other hand, I do want to talk about it just so I can say how absurd it is.

Essentially, what Fluke did was claim that paying for "contraception" is such a hardship for female grad students that the government should force other people to foot the bill for them. There is no delicate way to say this: Her mindset is so brainless that it's hard to decide where to start dissecting it.

Let's start with the fact that contraception is not expensive, as she would have us believe, but actually very cheap. According to Fluke, a student would need to pay $1,000 per year for contraception, by which it is universally assumed she means birth control pills. But in reality, the annual cost for "the pill" in 41 of our 50 states is only $108; i.e., less than the cost of eating two McDonald's value meals per month. This figure comes from the fact that in those 41 states, Target and Wal-Mart sell the pill for $9 per month.

In the other nine states, the average monthly price at Target and Wal-Mart is $27, which is about the same as a half-tank of gas. And because $27 per month equals $324 per year, even that price is less than one-third of what Fluke alleged.

So her foundational fact turns out to be fiction. It's a safe bet that the amount of money needed for a month's supply of birth control pills can be found occupying a small portion of what most college students set aside to buy alcohol. I dare say that subtracting the monthly cost of the pill from their beer budget would not even "force" them to "sacrifice" weekend binge drinking.

But the larger point is that Fluke would have been in the wrong even if she had gotten her numbers right. America is a free country and collegians are free to have sex, but that does not mean they have the right to impose the costs and consequences of their sexual choices on anyone else (nor, for that matter, do they have the right to impose the costs and consequences of any of their other choices).

Everyone receives the "rights versus responsibilities" lesson in grade school, and everyone understands it at that tender young age...It is annoying that a 30-year-old at one of America's most elite and powerful universities not only doesn't grasp it, but sees fit to broadcast her resulting, childish views to the federal government...And it is downright frightening that criticism of those views results in large swaths of the media and political establishment hailing her as some kind of civil rights heroine.

Fluke actually received a call from the president of the United States telling her that her parents should be proud. Granted, I am a cynic about everything Barack Obama does, and I suspect he made that call so people would keep talking about Fluke instead of focusing on his mounting failures, but I still think he actually believes what he told her and I am sure his leftist allies do as well. Which leads me to ask, of what should Fluke's parents be proud?

She is a grown woman and has no doubt done things to be proud of, but this is not one of them. She should be embarrassed to have treated the subsidizing of sex lives as if it is of any importance whatsoever. The only feedback she deserves is a figurative kick in the backside and a stern admonishment to grow up and stop acting like a spoiled teenager.