Discover the Networks-Sandra Fluke

An interesting biography and known associates file on a woman who claims to be "just a women who uses contraception"

Born in 1981, Sandra Fluke graduated from Cornell University in 2003 with bachelor's degrees in (a) Policy Analysis & Management, and (b) Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. She subsequently worked with the New York City-based Sanctuary for Families, which provides services for victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking. Fluke also interned with the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund and a number of other organizations dealing with those two issues.

Prior to commencing her legal studies at Georgetown Law School in 2009, Fluke researched the Jesuit university's health plans for students and found, to her dismay, that they did not cover birth control, abortifacients, or medical abortion procedures. Resolving that “I was absolutely not willing to compromise the quality of my education in exchange for my health care,” Fluke enrolled at Georgetown and then spent the next three years lobbying the school's administration to change its policy on the issue. Also during her stay at Georgetown, Fluke worked as development editor of the Journal of Gender and the Law; served as president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice; was vice president of the Women’s Legal Alliance; and became affiliated with Amnesty International, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Georgetown Democrats.

Some congressional Democrats invited Fluke to speak at a February 16, 2012 hearing on the constitutionality of the “Obamacare” mandate requiring religiously affiliated hospitals, schools, charities, and other health and social-service agencies to provide “free” abortifacient pills, sterilizations, and contraception on demand in their insurance plans—even if doing so violated their own moral codes and the teachings of their churches. But Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), who chaired the hearing, did not permit Fluke to speak, on grounds that Democrats had submitted her name too late to be considered. Fluke stayed for the first few moments of the hearing, during which a representative of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops spoke, and then
walked out in protest along with the Democratic women who sat on the committee.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) continued to push for Fluke to testify before a congressional panel. Maloney had ties to a progressive pollster, Celinda Lake, whose firm—Lake Research—had recently done work for both Maloney and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Lake also had
conducted extensive polling which led her to conclude that if Republican opposition to insurance coverage for birth control could be framed as a “women's rights” issue, Democrats could add significantly to their political support from female voters.As a result of Maloney's and Pelosi's persistence, Fluke testified before an unofficial congressional hearing led by Pelosi on February 23, 2012.

Identifying herself as “an American woman who uses contraceptives,” Fluke lamented that many women employed by religiously affiliated entities had “suffered financial, emotional, and medical burdens because of this lack of contraceptive coverage”; that “without insurance coverage, contraception can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school”; that “forty percent of female students at Georgetown Law report struggling financially as a result of this policy”; and that “this
policy communicates to female students that our school doesn’t understand our needs.”

Six days later, radio host Rush
 Limbaugh disparaged Fluke on his program as a “slut” and a “prostitute” who “is having so much sex she can't afford contraception,” and who “wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.” After Limbaugh's comments, President Barack Obama called Fluke to express his support for her. According to Fluke, the President “thanked me for helping to amplify the voices of women across the country ... Beyond that, he also just wanted to express concern and make sure that I was okay, which I thought was very kind and I assured him I was.”

On March 3, 
Limbaugh posted a statement online in which he publicly apologized to Fluke for his “insulting word choices.” Appearing on ABC's The View two days later, Fluke said that Limbaugh's apology was insufficient. Limbaugh then apologized again, saying he had “acted too much like the leftists who despise me.”

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly reasoned that the “Sandra Fluke contraception controversy was manufactured to divert attention away from the Obama administration’s disastrous decision to force [Catholic] organizations to provide insurance coverage for birth control and the ‘morning after’ pill.”

Soon after the controversy had arisen, SKDKnickerbocker, a public-relations agency whose Managing director is former White House communications director Anita Dunn, began representing Fluke. In early March 2012, professors, staffers and students at Georgetown and other law schools signed a statement that “strongly condemn[ed] the recent personal attacks on our student.” One signatory was Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, who had served from 2009-2011 as the Obama administration’s adviser to the undersecretary of defense for policy. Journalist Aaron Klein pointed out that yet another close Obama associate, John Podesta, was a visiting professor at Georgetown Law School during the Fluke controversy.

In addition to her views on insurance coverage for contraception and abortifacients, Fluke also believes that health insurance policies should be required—on pain of legal action—to pay for sex-change operations. A Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law article which Fluke co-edited with Karen Hu lamented that because of widespread “ignorance and bias against transgender persons,” individuals “wishing to undergo the gender reassignment process frequently face heterosexist employer health insurance policies that label the surgery as cosmetic or medically
unnecessary and therefore uncovered.”

Uh Oh Boys and Girls She's Baaaaaccccck

From Discover the Networks comes this notice that the anarchists, leftists, marxists, peaceniks, useful idiots, usual suspects and assorted malcontents will be gathering in Washington DC on 6 October for an anti-capitalist rally. The irony of this is, some of these anti-capitalists will be coming by charter bus, the owners of said charter bus being capitalist. If they were dedicated activists, they would all walk to DC and not buy a single item from anyone.

After the jump you can read the roster of revolutionaries scheduled to attend. Of course Susie Q and her merry band of ladies in pink spandex (be still my heart), will be there, as will ANSWER, UFPJ, WCW. As I said previously, the usual suspects, with some new group names thrown in.

More than 150 organizations are scheduled to send representatives to the DC gathering on October 6, including the All-African People's Revolutionary Party, the Backbone Campaign, Code Pink, Food Not Bombs, Global Exchange, the Green Party USA, Healthcare-Now, the International Action Center, International ANSWER, the Middle East Children's Alliance, Movement for a Democratic Society, the Network of Spiritual Progressives, Occupy Wall Street, Pax Christi, Peace Action, Progressive Democrats of America, Sojourners, Tikkun, United for Peace and Justice, Veterans for Peace, the War Resisters League, Women Against Military Madness, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and World Can't Wait. Another key supporter of O-2011 is the National Lawyers Guild.

The newly formed “October 2011″ movement will stage its kickoff rally in DC next Thursday. Calling on the U.S. government to end all economic policies “which foster a wealth divide,” this organization vehemently opposes federal spending cuts — favoring instead massive government expenditures for the purpose of “creating jobs.”

Encouraging its members and supporters to pursue “a culture of resistance,” O-2011 selected Washington, DC's Freedom Plaza as the site of its first major Call to Action, scheduled for October 6, 2011. This date was chosen because it marked the tenth anniversary of America's post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan, and because it represented what O-2011 called “the beginning of the 2012 federal austerity budget”—a reference to a recently passed debt-ceiling bill designed to curb the United States' escalating national debt. Promoting the October 6 event as a “nonviolent resistance similar to the Arab Spring and the Midwest awakening,” O-2011 has pledged to “resist the corporate machine” and to “demand that America's resources be invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation.”

The Best Trick the Devil Ever Pulled

was convincing people he didn't exist.

On Satan’s trail with Don Gabriele, the world’s most famous exorcist

We are in the infirmary of the Society of St Paul, the order of Father Gabriele Amorth, in the shadow of St Paul’s Basilica, Rome. The Vatican’s chief exorcist was taken to hospital last autumn with a blood infection and is now convalescing — “they found nothing serious”. Perhaps it was the Devil who laid him low. “Oh no — just an illness. He has more serious evil to perform.” Father Amorth made headlines this week by suggesting that those who had “given in to Satan’s temptations” included paedophile priests and even some cardinals and bishops who paid only lip service to the Gospels.

The growing crisis over the clerical sex abuse now engulfing Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican, he said, was the work of Satan, who had even “infiltrated the Vatican corridors”. Is the sex abuse crisis really due to the Devil? “Oh yes. All evil is due to the intervention of the Devil, including paedophilia.”

And the Vatican? “Legions of demons have lodged there. The majority of those in the Vatican do good work. But Pope Paul VI talked about the ‘smoke of Satan’ infiltrating the Vatican as long ago as 1972. Satan sets out to damage the leadership of the Church — and of politics, industry and sport, for that matter.”

And although all manner of incidents, scandals and misdemeanours in Italy and abroad leap to mind as potential evidence of diabolical intervention, he declines to give examples. Father Amorth — or Don Gabriele, as he is universally known — has just published The Memoirs of an Exorcist, a book of interviews with Marco Tosatti, the Vatican journalist. In a style that is somewhat reminiscent of a medieval chronicle, he describes his often hair-raising experiences over the past quarter of a century in the front line against the Evil One and his minions.

Father Amorth, aged nearly 85, is honorary president of the International Association of Exorcists. He fought for the Resistance in the Second World War, took law degree but then entered the Church. He began conducting exorcisms shortly after his ordination 60 years ago; in 1986 he was appointed by Cardinal Ugo Poletti, then the Vicar of Rome, as assistant to Father Candido Amantini, the chief exorcist, eventually succeeding him.

Now frail, he becomes animated as he describes his life-long struggle with demons who possess the bodies of their victims, at one stage spreading his arms wide to show me the length of one particular demon occupying the body of a woman he had “liberated”.

He talks to Lucifer and his demons, he says, and knows their names. On the writing table in his room he keeps pictures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, “who came into the world to fight the Devil and return us to God”. But the modern world, he says, has “given in to the Evil One. You see it in the lack of faith, the empty churches, the collapse of the family.”

“Compare the world of today to when I was a boy in Modena: families and parish communities were strong, women did not go out to work. Now they have to because one income cannot support a family. So young people are left to their own devices, they get into bad company, they have lost their roots and replaced them with the negative influences of television and the internet, or the occult.”

What about those who believe in neither God nor Satan? “The Devil is only too happy to take advantage of those who do not believe in his existence. It means he can operate with complete freedom, even inside the Church. He exploits lust and power.”

The Devil tries to reach all of us, Father Amorth adds, and “the possessed are those who listen to him most. Mind you, they are a minority. If you read my book you might get the impression the whole world is possessed, but I am describing a small number of cases, comparatively speaking.” His claim to have carried out 70,000 exorcisms seems incredible. “But I was talking about the number of exorcisms, not the number of people exorcised. You often have to exorcise someone dozens, even hundreds, of times, and an exorcism ritual can take anything from a few minutes to several hours.”

Exorcism can only be done with the approval of the local bishop, usually after medical or psychiatric tests show no rational explanation for the symptoms, which include vomiting, violent headaches and stomach cramps but also superhuman strength, fits and extreme aversion to holy symbols. He is adept, he says, at distinguishing hysterics from the real thing. There are more women than men among the possessed, “but we don’t know why. There are various explanations: Satan taking revenge on the Virgin Mary, or using women as a means of reaching men. None of them is convincing.”

The possessed talk in languages they do not know, including ancient tongues such as Aramaic, the language of Christ. “Sometimes the language is incomprehensible. I once asked a demon what it was and he said, ‘Satanic language’.” The victims often react so violently to the ritual of prayers, incantations, holy water and the sign of the Cross that they have to be held or tied down while the priest touches the possessed person with his stole and places his hand on his or her head.

In many cases, he says, they vomit objects such as nails or glass. Father Amorth has a collection weighing two kilograms. “You get used to being vomited over. I once performed an exorcism on a woman who managed to hit me in the face with a stream of vomit from the other side of the room — physically impossible.”

The Devil, he says, is humourless but does sometimes play tricks. He and his demons speak through the victim, sometimes using their normal voice but sometimes in hoarse, raucous tones. He imitates the unnerving low growl for me. They are not, however visible, any more than angels are.

“Angels exist, and how, but they are not as depicted in art — they are pure spirit. We all have guardian angels. Demons are, of course, fallen angels who rebelled against God; that is why they are so intelligent, and so arrogant.”

He does not believe in ghosts, which are “an invention of the human mind”.

Father Amorth has no designated successor, and complains that even now the Church hierarchy does not take exorcism — or the Devil — seriously enough. But “the Lord has made use of me” and his example has inspired many other priests — as did the 1973 film The Exorcist, which although “exaggerated” was “substantially true”.

At his age does he still have the stomach for the battle with Satan?

“Oh yes. I have work to do.”