Why the Far Right is Making Birth Control An Election Issue

Some seem surprised that the use of birth control has become an election issue. However, if one has followed far right Christian organizations for any length of time, you'd know that among the U. S. Supreme Court decisions the Christianists cannot abide is Griswold v. Connecticut which first enunciated the "right to privacy" while striking down bans on the use of birth control by married couples and which in many ways set the course for the eventual holdings in Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas. Indeed, it can be said that the Christianists believe that individuals have no right to privacy and that consenting adults should be barred from engaging in any activity not in 100% conformity with the Christianists' religious beliefs.

Championing the Christianist anti-contraception mindset among the GOP presidential candidates is Rick Santorum who would, if he had his way, outlaw all forms of contraception and criminalize all sex outside of procreative sex between heterosexual married couples. Adding to the insanity has been the Roman Catholic Church that wants the media conversations to be about anything other than the Church's still exploding sex abuse scandal - my Google search agent delivers new Catholic Church sex abuse related stories virtually every day - and the Church's jihad against LGBT civil rights. The Washington Post looks at how birth control has returned to the main political stage. Unfortunately, the piece fails to consider the ultimate agenda of the Christianists fully. Here are some highlights:

Who says you can’t turn the clock back? Decades ago, near the end of the Age of Aquarius, a Republican congressman from Texas argued passionately that the federal government should pay for birth control for poor women. . . . said George H.W. Bush. “If family planning is anything, it is a public health matter.”

Title X, the law he sponsored that still funds family planning for the poor, passed the House by a vote of 298 to 32. It passed the Senate unanimously. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, enthusiastically signed it. That was 1970.

This is now: The issue of birth control has suddenly become an obsession of the 2012 presidential campaign. To many observers, it seems that the clock has indeed been turned back.

Using birth control to have sex without making a baby has been settled social behavior, not a taboo but an ordinary prescription that virtually all American women present at the drugstore counter at some point in their lives. For many, it seems the common-sense way to avoid the prospect of abortion, which has been the really divisive issue of sexual politics.

This might seem a bewildering turn of events, particularly when polls consistently show that (a) voters place jobs and the economy atop the list of their concerns and (b) large majorities of Americans of all faiths support the use of birth control, the most commonly prescribed drug for women between 18 and 44, and have done so for years. But elections have a way of becoming national conversations — often unwieldy ones.

This expansion of reproductive rights has thrilled liberals and dismayed conservatives, who see it as a violation of the separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution. Catholic bishops have been most opposed to the policy directive, because doctrine holds that any birth control except natural family planning is a sin against God. And the bishops have gained allies among those eager to overturn the entire health-care act.

Layer on the public proclamations of one of those candidates, former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.), who has pulled ahead of the presumptive front-runner, Mitt Romney, in several national polls. He says that states should be free to ban birth control, that prenatal testing leads to abortion and that as president he would warn the nation about “the dangers of contraception.”

The long-settled right to contraception takes its place alongside all kinds of cultural struggles underway in America, over immigration, gay rights, lifestyle, government power and income inequality, at a time when people feel threatened and wary of giving away what they have. Any one of those can erupt and spread in fast frenzy, amplified through the bullhorn of social media.

[T]he chief reason birth control has emerged as a prominent issue is because the religious freedom argument can be a fresh line of attack against Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment, which is being challenged in the courts.