Divider-in-Chief (12 page)

The HHS mandate was a direct violation of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion. And it provoked an avalanche of criticism.
The U.S. Catholic bishops did not mince words, vowing to fight the order as “literally unconscionable.”
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I'll discuss the mandate's religious implications in greater depth in a later chapter. For now, I want to focus on how liberals turned the debate into evidence of a Republican “war on women.”

The contraceptive mandate controversy dominated the political headlines throughout the spring. It became a topic of debate in the Republican primary campaign (all the candidates opposed the rule), legislation was drafted to release employers from the mandate on religious grounds (it failed), and parish priests across the country discussed the issue with their congregations. But Democrats and their allies saw an opportunity to portray the pushback not as a response to an unprecedented attack on a constitutional right, but rather as one more front in a larger Republican war on women's health.

Abortion rights groups such as Planned Parenthood,
Moveon.org
, and NARAL Pro-Choice America launched ad campaigns claiming that Republicans and the Catholic Church wanted to take away women's birth control. “Women are coming out of the woodwork, saying, ‘They're attacking birth control? You've got to be kidding!'” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president for policy and communications of Planned Parenthood, told the
New York Times
.
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The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee began an ad campaign urging voters to fight the GOP's “war on women.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced, “House Republicans have launched an all-out war on women.”
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The DCCC later sent a fundraising email accusing Republicans of “waging an unrelenting war on women.” The identical phrase was used shortly after in an email blast by EMILY's List.
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Hyperbole was the order of the day. New York Democratic Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney said, “I think that we're headed for another year of the woman. The debate has really brought clarity to the fact that women's health needs are under attack by an increasingly conservative Republican party. I think it's much worse than I've ever seen before.”
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Democratic
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas said, “I think the next act will be dragging women out of patient rooms into the streets and screaming over their bodies as they get dragged out of getting access to women's health care.”
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Speaking at a NARAL Pro-Choice America luncheon, Secretary Sebelius said that Republicans who oppose the mandate, funding for Planned Parenthood, and other key items on the feminist agenda “don't just want to go after the last 18 months, they want to roll back the last 50 years in progress women have made in comprehensive health care in America. We've come a long way in women's health over the last few decades, but we are in a war.”
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It wasn't just surrogates for Obama who engaged in the “war” rhetoric. The Obama re-election campaign took full advantage as well. It launched “Women's Week of Action,” a major effort to rally women that included phone bank calls, campus activities, house parties, and media events, as well as mailings to one million women in battleground states.

The Democratic National Committee released a web video charging that Mitt Romney is “wrong for women,” in part because of his stated opposition to the mandate. But the public saw politics in the controversy. A March public opinion poll by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that half of respondents said they believed the mandate debate was “mostly being driven by election-year politics.”
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In the wake of the mandate announcement, third-year Georgetown University Law School student Sandra Fluke joined students from other universities for a press conference about birth control at Catholic universities. Staff members to Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee saw Fluke's appearance at the news conference and recruited her to testify about access to birth control at a congressional hearing on February 16, 2012. But because the congressional hearing
focused on religious liberty questions surrounding the mandate, not the availability of birth control, congressional Republicans opposed Fluke's appearance and she did not testify.

So Democrats held an unofficial hearing on February 23, at which Fluke appeared as a witness and spoke at length. Fluke talked about the experiences of her married law school classmates, complaining that they had to pay as much as $1,000 a year in out-of-pocket costs for birth control prescriptions because Georgetown, a Catholic institution, did not cover birth control in its health insurance plans. “We refuse to pick between a quality education and our health,” she declared.
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The Democrats who invited Fluke to testify tried to cast her as an everywoman whose friends couldn't get the vital health care they needed because of the Catholic Church's outdated views on women and sex. But Fluke had been a student leader in the leftwing feminist and “gender equity” movements as an undergraduate at Cornell University. She received her bachelor's degree in “Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.” She was the president of Georgetown Law's abortion advocacy group, and had spent her three years there lobbying the school's administration to change its policy on birth control coverage. In other words, Fluke was no everywoman; she was a dedicated liberal activist.

What's more, Fluke's contention about the onerous costs of birth control was demonstrably false. Birth control pills can be purchased for as little as $9 per month at pharmacies near Georgetown's campus. As one conservative reporter put it, “Nine dollars is less than the price of two beers at a Georgetown bar.”
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The Fluke story might have ended there. But it got new life when radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh discussed Fluke's testimony on air, calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute.” While Limbaugh was doing what he does best—getting people's attention with shock therapy—he had a serious point: it was hardly reasonable to ask a Catholic institution to subsidize a student's sex life. But Democrats made sure that point got lost in the rhetoric.

Limbaugh later apologized,
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but the Democrats used his comments to further advance the “war on women” narrative for a few more weeks and continue to distract attention away from the contraceptive mandate's gross violation of religious liberty.

Not surprisingly, President Obama entered the fray, publicly condemning Limbaugh's remarks and calling Miss Fluke to offer her his support. At a press conference, Obama explained:

Listen carefully whenever the president talks about abortion or birth control. Very often you'll hear him invoke what would seem to be unlikely sources of inspiration for his radical views: his daughters, Malia and Sasha.

The Obamas have gone to great lengths to make clear that their daughters are off-limits to the media and political opponents. “I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people's families are off limits, and people's children are especially off limits,” Obama said in 2008.
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And well they should be. When Beanie Babies began designing dolls resembling the girls, Michelle Obama complained, calling the dolls “inappropriate,” and the company dropped its plans.
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In March 2012, several liberal news websites
published stories about the Obama's elder daughter Malia's planned spring break vacation to Mexico with twelve friends and twenty-five Secret Service agents. But after the White House complained about the coverage, many of the stories were either changed or deleted completely. “From the beginning of the administration, the White House has asked news outlets not to report on or photograph the Obama children when they are not with their parents and there is no vital news interest,” Kristina Schake, Michelle Obama's communications director, told
Politico
.
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But President Obama often goes out of his way to talk about his daughters to bolster his policy proposals or political objectives. And often it's in the context of abortion. On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama told an audience that he supported sex education that included information about contraception and abortion because, “I don't want [my daughters] punished with a baby.”
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Obama has talked about his children in explaining his position on other hot-button cultural issues. When he came out for same-sex marriage in May, Obama told ABC's Robin Roberts:

I don't doubt that Obama's views on cultural issues are informed in part by his experiences as a father. But I also don't doubt that Obama figures Americans will be more likely to accept his radical positions on those issues if he prefaces his statements of support for them by declaring that they arise from his experiences as a father of two daughters. It's a cynical game Obama plays, on the one hand insisting his kids are “off-limits,” and on the other invoking them when political necessity calls.

The Democrats' “Republican War on Women” narrative was driven by more than just the HHS mandate and the Fluke affair. They cited other “attacks,” including state and federal efforts to de-fund Planned Parenthood (America's largest abortion provider), and legislation in several states to require that women seeking abortion first be shown ultrasound imaging of their unborn baby.

The conventional wisdom held that all the birth control talk was hurting Republicans (who were, perversely, often accused of making contraception an issue when the real issue was the economy). As many journalists pointed out, most women have used birth control. But polls showed that the left's effort to tarnish the GOP as woman-haters might have backfired.

On March 12, 2012, the
Weekly Standard
's John McCormick analyzed the polls to see whether the mandate debate had brought any benefit to Obama and the Democrats, and came to the conclusion that, if anything, the mandate debate was hurting them, as Romney's numbers went up and Obama's went down.
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Some polls showed that women were moving towards Romney and away from Obama. An April
New York Times/
CBS News poll found that Obama held a 49 percent to 43 percent lead against Romney among women, but by mid-May the poll found that female voters preferred Romney to Obama by two percentage points, 46 percent to 44 percent.
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A late May 2012
Washington Post
-ABC News poll found Romney up thirteen percentage points and Obama down seven points among women since April.
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After having spent three months advancing the “Republican war on women” narrative, Democrats had achieved little, other than to convince more women to give Romney a second look.

If President Obama and other Democrats seem preoccupied with abortion and birth control, it's not only because they need to distract the public's
attention from their abysmal record on the economy and the general unpopularity of Obamacare. It's also because most of the women's groups that have access to and influence with Obama and the Democrats are preoccupied with those issues. And the reason they have so much access and influence is that they raise so much money for Democrats.

The abortion lobby spends about $40 million each election cycle to elect pro-abortion-rights Democrats to office. In a 2011 column, the
Washington Examiner
's Tim Carney shed some light on the money link between abortion groups and the Democratic Party, noting that “Everywhere you see Obama and his party raising money, you see an abortion activist playing a lead role.”
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As the administration searched for an “accommodation” to the mandate after widespread backlash, it was warned by Planned Parenthood and other abortion groups that they would vigorously oppose any compromise that resulted in employees paying even a penny for birth control.

The morning after Mitt Romney officially secured the Republican presidential nomination, Planned Parenthood endorsed Obama and announced the launch of a $1.4 million ad buy slamming Romney.
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It is an understatement to say that in the Obama era, the abortion lobby has a lot of influence with the Democratic Party. In fact, in many ways, the abortion lobby
is
the Democratic Party.

Many Obama administration officials once worked for the abortion industry. In April 2012, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services hired Tait Sye as deputy assistant secretary for public affairs. Sye had formerly been Planned Parenthood's media director. The hire prompted Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, to tell
Politico
, “Personnel is policy.... This is one more example of how intertwined the Obama administration is with the abortion industry and Planned Parenthood.”
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Other examples included Dawn Johnsen, former legal director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, who was appointed but never confirmed to a position in the Justice Department, and Ellen Moran, former executive director of the pro-abortion group
EMILY's List, who was Obama's White House communications director before moving to the Department of Commerce as chief of staff to Secretary Gary Locke.