Jason Lewis: Republican politician complains that he can’t call women ‘sluts’

A Republican congressman's bigoted comments about women from a radio talk show before his time in office have been unearthed.

Jason Lewis once pondered on why it is unacceptable to call women ‘sluts’, The Washington Post reports.

The recordings, published by CNN, follow efforts to re-elect Lewis in a Minnesota congressional district near Minneapolis.

The audio clip has him speaking about the controversy surrounding conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh after he insulted and disparaged Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student who was to testify to Congress about the fact that her health plan did not pay for birth control, back in February 2012.

Limbaugh called Fluke a "slut".

In a March 2012 episode of his show, Lewis stated:

Well, the thing is, can we call anybody a slut? This is what begs the question. Take this woman out of it, take Rush out of it for a moment.

Does a woman now have the right to behave - and I know there's a double standard between the way men chase women and running and running around - you know, I'm not going to get there, but you know what I'm talking about. But it used to be that women were held to a little bit of a higher standard. We required modesty from women.

Now, are we beyond those days where a woman can behave as a slut, but you can't call her a slut?

Lewis went on to further defend Limbaugh.

Now Limbaugh’s reasoning was, look, if you’re demanding that the taxpayers pay for your contraception, you must use a lot of them and therefore, ergo, you’re very sexually active and in the old days, what we used to call people who were in college or even graduate school who were sexually active, we called them sluts. Especially if you want somebody to pay for it.

He added that Limbaugh’s comment was an "aspect of entertainment radio", but bemoaned the fact that people couldn’t refer to Madonna as a "slut", given that she’s had "many lovers".

What did we call those people 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago? You can’t do that today, it’s too politically incorrect.

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