December 6, 2012
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Tags: birth control, Concerned Women for America, Reproductive Rights, TFN

‘What It Really Means to Be a Woman’?

Penny Nance, president of the religious-right group Concerned Women for America, is angry that TIME magazine is considering Sandra Fluke for its Person of the Year. Fluke has been an outspoken advocate of the Obama administration’s new rule that contraception be covered in the health insurance plans offered by most employers. Right-wing politicians, activists and pundits have viciously attacked Fluke, with Rush Limbaugh infamously calling her a “slut.”

In an email to CWA supporters today, Nance expresses her outrage that Fluke would even be considered by TIME, which annually names the person who most influenced the news for better or worse over the past year. Nance says Fluke’s nomination “makes my blood boil”:

For too long, radical feminists have been center stage, dominating women’s issues and denigrating what it really means to be an American woman.

…

We don’t need a “Person of the Year” award to keep fighting, but I won’t allow Sandra Fluke, TIME Magazine, or any other anti-family Leftist speak for me.

So by insisting that women have access to affordable contraception, Fluke is somehow “denigrating what it really means to be an American woman”? By rejecting the notion that employers have a right to limit, based on their own religious and other personal beliefs, the health care options of their employees, Fluke is an “anti-family Leftist”?

Nance’s outrageous comments make it clear that Concerned Women for American is mostly concerned about controlling the private decisions individuals make about their own lives. And she has allies in Texas. In 2011, for example, Texas lawmakers engaged in what one shamelessly called a “war on birth control.” Some religious-right activists in Texas have even absurdly argued that contraception is bad for women’s health.

TFN President Kathy Miller has been and remains a strong advocate for women’s access to affordable contraception in Texas. When lawmakers return to Austin for the 2013 legislative session, TFN will be working hard at the Capitol to protect that access from the attacks of extremists like Nance, other religious-right groups and their allies in the Legislature.

6 thoughts on “‘What It Really Means to Be a Woman’?”

  1. They seem to be forgetting that the Person of the Year is merely measuring impact magnitude, not whether it was a good one. (1938 being the most obvious example.) The degree of outrage the suggestion provokes in the CWA is actually supporting evidence for the nomination being appropriate.

  3. CWA is ridiculous, as usual. Since I live in Austin, I think it may be time to ask TFN and Kathy Miller how I can best help them smack down the Lege.

    1. She’s a reasonable candidate, but she’s only a nominee. There are others on the list who would seem to have at least as good a chance at the title.