Women’s health advocate Sandra Fluke — who came to national prominence when Rush Limbaugh called her a “slut” and “prostitute” earlier this year — argued that the choice between President Obama and Mitt Romney was a choice between “two profoundly different futures that could await women” in her speech at the convention in Charlotte Wednesday.
Electing Mitt Romney, Fluke said, would mean a future that looks like an “obsolete relic of our past.”
In that America, your new president could be a man who stands by when a public figure tries to silence a private citizen with hateful slurs. A man who won’t stand up to the slurs, or to any of the extreme, bigoted voices in his own party. It would be an America in which you have a new vice president who co-sponsored a bill that would allow pregnant women to die preventable deaths in our emergency rooms. An America in which states humiliate women by forcing us to endure invasive ultrasounds we don’t want and our doctors say that we don’t need.
In Obama’s America, Fluke said, “our president, when he hears a young woman has been verbally attacked, thinks of his daughters—not his delegates or donors—and stands with all women. And strangers come together, reach out and lift her up. And then, instead of trying to silence her, you invite me here—and give me a microphone—to amplify our voice.”
