NewsBusters’ Noel Sheppard has picked a particularly stupid way to rebut Jon Stewart.
In a March 6 post, Sheppard took offense to the “Daily Show” host for “hysterically claiming” that if having insurance cover the cost of contraception is paying for someone to have sex, as Rush Limbaugh contended, then so is paid maternity leave. Sheppard’s big response: “unpaid maternity leave depending on how much a woman makes could cost her and her family tens of thousands of dollars.” That really has nothing to do with the issue, but whatever.
But then Sheppard huffed:
But there’s potentially a larger point in Stewart’s attack on Limbaugh and Kelly: if Fluke were a conservative going to Congress and asking for her birth control to be covered, the Daily Show host and his crew would have savaged her.
Wrong — Sheppard’s MRC colleagues would have savaged her first before Stewart could have a chance.
Since free birth control is not a conservative position, Sheppard and the MRC boys would be adamantly deny that a woman who advocates it — even if she meets all the other requirements of conservatism — is a true conservative.
How do we know this? Because Sheppard’s colleagues perform this same bit of party-line Heathering on conservatives they have deemed insufficiently conservative, from Kathleen Parker to David Brooks to David Frum to Joe Scarborough to Jennifer Rubin.
Indeed, the MRC prefers its conservative women to sound like Rush Limbaugh. A March 6 NewsBusters post by Ken Shepherd touts how Georgetown student Angela Morabito said that Fluke was really saying, “please pay for me to have all the sex I want!” Morabito added, “And I know that we are so, so much better than what Sandra Fluke would make us out to be.”
Would Ken Shepherd treat Morabito the same if she changed her position on contraception? Absolutely not. She would cease being conservative in the dogmatic view of the MRC.
Noel Sheppard has forgotten that his employer is more ideologically rigid — and picks its friends and enemies accordingly — than Stewart will ever be.