Fluke's degree from Cornell is in Policy Analysis & Management and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (which explains going to law school - that undergraduate degree is really, really useful on its own < /sarc &gr ). At Cornell, she protested a pro-life display when she was an officer of Cornell's Students Acting for Gender Equality (SAGE). At Georgetown, she got involved in Law Students for Reproductive Justice, the International Women's Human Rights Clinic, the Women's Legal Alliance, and the Journal of Gender and the Law. That $3,000 public interest job she mentioned in her statements to the Democrats in Congress was at the Womens Lawyers Association of Los Angeles.
When her photo was posted at FR, people joked about whether she was straight. That resume above would normally cause people at FR to make similar suggestions.
And we don't know, because in her statement to the Democrats, Fluke never mentioned her own sex life or her own past, current, or proposed use of contraceptives a single time.
Fluke said she was going to be the voice of other women and proceeded to tell the story (some outrageous, and with no guarantee any of them were true - and she wasn't under oath) of six other women. Generally women who had some medical need for birth control pills but couldn't get them paid for under a medical plan. The stories were outlandish - a woman who had orders from a physician for a medical condition, but an insurance company interviewed her and decided she really wanted them for sex, so it denied coverage; a woman who didn't seek medical assistance for rape because she knew contraceptives weren't covered and assumed that any medical care having to do with her ya-ya wasn't going to be covered.
Limbaugh could have attacked Fluke's stories as preposterous, or something that happened once in a hundred years, or something based on the stupidity of the woman (the rape story). But he chose to go after Fluke and to call her a slut and a prostitute? Over and over and over. He kept saying she claimed she was having lots of sex, and that she was having lots of sex and wanted to be paid for it, or that she was having so much sex and she wanted somebody else to pay for it.
He claimed Fluke said she was having so much sex having so much sex, 'it's amazing she can still walk.'
He pulled her parents into it, asking if they were proud that they daughter "testifie[d] she's having so much sex she can't afford her own birth control pills." Limbaugh used every possible iteration, and they were all about Fluke testifying that she was having lots and lots and lots of sex . . .
And so people on FR think that Fluke said she did. And people on FR think Fluke testified that her birth control cost $3,000 per year, and that she couldn't afford it.
But Rush blew it by not focusing on the BS that Fluke actually DID say and instead going personal on Fluke's own sex life and promiscuity and calling her names.
Because Fluke never mentioned her own sex life a single time. She never mentioned her own birth control a single time. She never mentioned the cost of her birth control, or any financial burden on herself. She held herself out as some 30-year-old expert on other women. And for that, she should have been torn to shreds, but not personally attacked with made-up stuff about stories she never said about her own sex life.
And the next time the question of whether Rush Limbaugh is a blowhard comes up in the media? They can point to the fact he spent four days claiming lefy Fluke talked about her sex life and contraceptive needs to Congress, and personally attacked her for it, when there was no factual basis for Limbaugh's attack on her.