Republicans waging a war on women? (you think?)

The target of Rush Limbaugh’s anger, and the more controlled chagrin of his conservative fans, was not a high-profile hooker, but a soberly spoken young woman testifying before a congressional panel to oppose a federal health-care exemption that would allow employers with religious beliefs to opt out of covering the cost of contraception.

The Toronto Star:

Even on Rush Limbaugh’s Stage of Rage it was a showstopper.

“What does that make her?” the shock jock fumed into his radio mike. “It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.”

And the kicker, “if we are going to pay for your contraceptives — and thus pay for you to have sex — we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

Limbaugh backed off from his tirade against Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke with a vague apology as advertisers cancelled their contracts. But not before a political tornado that had been brewing for the past two years in the United States spiralled out of control.

“This is absolutely a war against women,” said Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, which advocates for women’s equality. “It’s deliberate, intentional and as serious as a heart attack.”

She was talking about a topic that has just begun to sizzle on the political hotplate: a Republican-led campaign to undermine women’s reproductive rights across the states as well as federal jurisdictions.

Using religious rights, fiscal restraint and an ongoing U.S. culture war as weapons, it has targeted abortion, contraception, even rape laws.

Along the way, it has alienated the party’s moderate members, many of them women, and caused internal anguish at a “coup” carried out by extremists on the conservative far right, who have pulled Republicans into a pit they are scrambling to climb out of before the November presidential election.

To activists, and a sizeable number of ordinary American women, the Blunt Amendment — sponsored by Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri — was the latest salvo in an ongoing battle.

And it kept pace with two pieces of Virginia legislation that would have forced women seeking abortion to undergo an invasive vaginal ultrasound scan, and declared a fertilized egg a “person,” with full constitutional rights. “The Republicans want “government small enough to fit in a uterus,” quipped the Blogosphere.

The Blunt Amendment, defeated last week by a wafer-thin 51-48, would have allowed any employer or insurance plan to refuse coverage of any health-care item or service that offended “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

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