Why Are Republicans Going to War Against Birth Control?

The answer to the question poised in the captioned post is actually pretty easy; Christofascists now control the Republican Party and the Christofascists simply cannot stand anyone other than drearily married heterosexuals engaging in sex or worse, enjoying it.  Dan Savage summed it up well:

W]hy are conservatives fighting so hard to make contraception harder for women to obtain? Because they don’t think people—young people, poor people, unmarried people, gay people—should be able to enjoy “consequence-free sex.” Because it’s sex that they hate—it’s sex for pleasure that they hate—and they hate that kind of sex more than they hate abortion, teen moms, and welfare spending combined. Knowing that some people are having sex for pleasure without having their futures disrupted by an unplanned pregnancy or having their health compromised by a sexually transmitted infection or having to run a traumatizing gauntlet of shrieking “sidewalk counselors” to get to an abortion clinic keeps them up at night.

 But this obsession with pandering and prostituting themselves to the Christofascists is short sighted - in my view at least - when one recognizes how this war on contraception can quickly becomes perceived as a war on women.    And this war on women could well play into the hands of Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections.  A piece in Hot Air looks at how Republicans may be shooting themselves.  Here are excerpts:

Some core Democratic voters who were thus far chronically unresponsive to stimuli designed to get them enthused about the upcoming midterm elections, have been energized by the Supreme Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby. The left continues to wring their hands over last Monday’s Supreme Court decision; their reactions ranging from dismay over the establishment of an American theocracy to the decrying the outlawing of contraception altogether. 

Democrats want to lure Republicans into a fight over birth control with legislation to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision that ObamaCare may not require certain businesses to include contraception in their employee health coverage,” The Hill’s Elise Viebeck reported.

Democrats are expected to introduce the measures prior to Congress’s August recess as part of an effort to recalibrate the party’s election-year messaging. Their hope is to turn out female voters by casting the court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby as a strike against reproductive rights.

And that’s a fight conservatives may welcome. No matter how justified, no matter how righteous, no matter how wrong-headed their opposition may be; Republicans will be stepping into a trap of Democratic design if they allow themselves to be cast as the party opposed to all forms of family planning. 

[I]f Republicans get into a rhetorical war with Democrats over access to or the morality of various forms of birth control — from common contraceptives to emergency pharmaceuticals — it will play directly into Democratic hands by motivating their formerly dispirited female constituency. 

So far, Republicans have done a good job of failing to provide Democrats with a sound bite or course of action which plays into the War on Women narrative, but the party in power is going to push Republicans to their breaking point. Congressional Republicans would be better served by offering women a positive rather than a negative agenda on birth control which is a medical necessity for many women. 

While not addressed, the war on women also translates directly into the continued GOP war on gays who, like the "promiscuous sluts" fantasized about by Rush Limbaugh, are anathema to Christofascist who want sex to be miserable and aimed solely for procreation.   Personally, I hope the Republicans fall into the Democrat trap.