Alex Henderson

The Culture Wars

The Sexual Ignorance of
Rush “Pillhead” Limbaugh

By Alex Henderson
RealmNoir, March 18, 2012

As an American, one of the most frustrating things is trying to explain the Christian Right to Europeans. Most politicians and political commentators who are considered right-of-center in Holland, Spain, Belgium, Denmark or France are not flat-out insane the way that religious extremist and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, for example, is flat-out insane. And if a European needs additional proof of just how dysfunctional the United States can be when it comes to sex, he/she need look no further than the recent tirades of Rush “Pillhead” Limbaugh.

For many years, Limbaugh has been the #1 bully of AM neocon talk radio. The problem with being the schoolyard bully is that eventually, someone becomes fed up and takes him down a peg or two. Well, Limbaugh recently crossed the line once again, but this time, he got a lot more than he bargained for. And his critics are giving him the proverbial beatdown he has been asking for.

A major controversy recently erupted when Limbaugh turned his wrath on a Georgetown University law student named Sandra Fluke. Limbaugh went ballistic because Fluke, speaking at a Congressional event, was in favor of health insurance plans being required to cover female contraception. Merely disagreeing with Fluke wasn’t enough for Limbaugh; he also felt the need to assail her character and describe her as a “slut” and a “prostitute.” According to Limbaugh’s twisted “logic,” asking health insurance plans to cover female contraception is the same as being paid to have sex. And Limbaugh went on to say that if health insurance plans are going to be required to cover Fluke’s contraception, the least she could do is make an adult video for his viewing pleasure. Limbaugh said: “If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. And I'll tell you what it is: we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

Limbaugh’s idiotic attack on Fluke has resulted in an aggressive advertising boycott; so far, Pillhead has lost more than 150 advertisers. Most Republicans have been unwilling to offer anything other than tepid criticism of Limbaugh’s remarks, but one exception is David Frum. Unlike GOP presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, Frum didn’t mince words: “Even by the rough standards of cable/talk radio/digital talk, Limbaugh’s verbal abuse of Sandra Fluke set a new kind of low. I can’t recall anything as brutal, ugly and deliberate ever being said by such a prominent person and so emphatically repeated. This was not a case of a bad ‘word choice.’ It was a brutally sexualized accusation, against a specific person, prolonged over three days.”

Pillhead’s defamation of Fluke was ignorant and wrong-headed on so many levels. Millions of women all over the world receive contraception through either public or private health insurance plans, which in Limbaugh’s diseased mind, is no different from turning tricks on La Rue St. Denis (one of Paris’ red light districts). When Limbaugh went off on Fluke, he was attacking millions of other women as well—and he forgets that contraception reduces the number of abortions and out-of-marriage pregnancies (two of the things that GOP culture warriors love to rail against). Fluke was promoting personal responsibility (another thing Republicans claim to believe in), and Pillhead verbally assaulted her for it.

Unfortunately, Pillhead knows a lot about more about OxyContin than he knows about contraception; Limbaugh’s comments demonstrate that he doesn’t even understand how birth control pills work. During his anti-Fluke rants, he implied that the amount of sex a sexually active woman has determines the number of birth control pills she needs to take in order to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Limbaugh said, “Miss Fluke, have you ever heard of not having sex? Have you ever heard of not having sex so often?” and “The women in her law school program are having so much sex that they’re going broke buying birth control pills……She’s having so much sex, she can’t afford her own birth control pills, apparently.”

According to Limbaugh, birth control pills need to be taken only on the days a sexually active woman is having sex. But the pill doesn’t work the way that Viagra works. It needs to be taken every day. Rachel Maddow, who hosts a program on the cable news network MSNBC, summated it up perfectly: “I think Rush Limbaugh thinks you take a birth control pill to avoid getting pregnant each time you have sex—so the more times you have sex, the more birth control pills you need…..(But) you take a birth control pill every day even if you’re not going to have sex at all that day or even if you’re going to have sex 1000 times that day. You just need the one pill for that day…..It does not matter how often you have sex. That does not increase the number of birth control pills you have to take.”

Limbaugh is a master of racism, classism and misogyny, but he obviously flunked sex education.

How ironic that Limbaugh, a long-time supporter of the Christian Right, asked Fluke to make a porn video for his enjoyment. Christian Right culture warriors like Santorum spend a lot of time bashing porn instead of focusing on real issues like the economy, but when Pillhead asks a young law student to make a porn video for his viewing pleasure, they won’t condemn him. Santorum is a total hypocrite, much like Pillhead himself.

Pillhead recommends abstinence for Sandra Fluke, but he had no problem with fornication when, in 2009, he was detained for three hours at the Palm Beach Airport in Florida for having a bottle of Viagra in his luggage; Limbaugh, who was coming back from a trip to the Dominican Republic, was unmarried at the time. Some of the more radical feminists are much too quick to cry sexism whenever their opinions are challenged, but in Limbaugh’s case, the word “sexism” is quite appropriate. Limbaugh opposes fornication unless, of course, he is the one doing the fornicating.

Perhaps the saddest thing of all about Limbaugh’s anti-Fluke diatribes is the way they underscore just how dysfunctional the United States is when it comes to sex. In most developed countries, it is widely understood that women should have easy and affordable access to contraception; in the U.S., a woman who feels that way is labeled a “slut” by the king of AM neocon talk radio.

Some of the people leading the anti-Limbaugh boycott are calling for his show to be taken off the air altogether. But that is unlikely to happen. “The Rush Limbaugh Show” isn’t catering to liberal/progressives, centrists, independents or the libertarian part of the right; it is catering to the rabid social conservatives, birthers, theocrats and unhinged ideologues who dominate today’s Republican Party. While those ideologues are a lunatic fringe, they have made Limbaugh’s show profitable. And Limbaugh will continue to serve as a reminder of just how incredibly dysfunctional the United States can be where sex is concerned.

   Alex Henderson is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in The L.A. Weekly, AlterNet, Billboard, Spin, XBIZ, Creem, The Pasadena Weekly and a long list of other well-known publications.  He can be followed on Twitter @alexvhenderson.

Republican Party hack Rush "Pillhead" Limbaugh (above) is in hot water for his recent tirade against Georgetown University Law student Sandra Fluke (below).