The ever-more daunting task of seeing exactly what's going on

So now we have two instances of conservative figures uttering remarks regarding matters that bring the matter of gender to the fore that could be argued to be over the top. There is, of course, what Rush Limbaugh said about Sandra Fluke, and also what Indiana congressman Bob Morris said about the Girl Scouts in a private e-mail he sent to fellow House members. And, just as in the Rush case, in which congressional Pub leaders felt they more or less had to distance themselves from the remarks, those leaders felt that the proper response was to wear Girl Scout sashes and otherwise demonstrate their admiration for that American institution.
Let's do some parsing. Rush was really only over the top and off the mark with one of the incendiary words he used: "prostitute." It was badly ill-considered, in that it muddied the waters with a bad analogy. It was inaccurate. There's nothing prostitutional about Sandra Fluke's behavior. On the other hand, the term "slut" connotes a female person who engages in a lot of casual sex, a behavior Fluke pretty much acknowledged in her Capitol Hill testimony. Sure, the term is pejorative, but, objectively speaking, is it not accurate?
Similarly, Morris chose perhaps the most purple way to convey what he knew to be true about the Girl Scouts, thereby ensuring that he would reap the howls and ridicule of the usual crowd.
One point in all of this, of course, is that these unfortunate utterances obscure the reality that Fluke indeed wants taxpayers to finance the removal of any consequences for her particular form of recreation, as well as the Catholic university she attends to de facto condone such activity, and that the board of directors of the Girl Scouts has been a sewer of progressivism for years.
There's an even larger point, however. The over-the-top comments play directly into the hands of the archtects of an agenda that seeks to remake basic human interaction and basic gender identity. What the Rush situation and the Bob Morris situation have in common is their invitation to impart some kind of inherent righteousness to being female. It becomes incredibly easy for the radical left - which, these days, includes the MSM, the educational infrastructure, the arts-and-entertainment world, and much of the religious sector of our society - to mount an argument along the lines of "It's time once and for all to eradicate this backward anti-woman element from our culture."
Once again, the center of gravity in the debate shifts from what's really going on to what the left wants it to be. No one is talking about "keeping women down." If you want substantiation of that claim, look at which side of the ideological divide is most vocal about the subjugation of women in the Muslim world, and which side is most inclined to make excuses for it.
It would be tempting to make the point of a post such as this the need to "strike a balance" in the way conservatives sound alarm bells about phenomena such as Sandra Fluke or the Girl Scouts - the whole "everybody-should-tone-down-the-rhetoric" position. Again, that's not the point. As always, the point is establishing clarity, something that becomes a Herculean - perhaps even Sisyphean - task in these times of sound bytes, text messages and ever-shrinking attention spans.