This is nothing less than The Most Important Issue Facing Our Country. Not the war in Afghanistan, or the still-sluggish economy, or the rise of China, or the unrest in the Middle East, or any of literally a hundred other issues we face. No. The #1 problem facing this country is women having sex.
I look at the course of public discussion over the last few weeks, and I cannot believe my ears. Birth control? Seriously? We're talking about birth control?! Didn't our grandparents settle that issue like forty years ago? Ah, but therein lies the rub. Conservatives are still nursing wounds from the culture wars of the 1950's and 60's. Like a doddering old Confederate veteran, they steadfastly insist that their way of life will rise again. They are wrong.
The social values that predominate in the Republican party are woefully out of step with the majority of Americans. And this presents a big problem for them. For thirty years they have won elections by being a coalition of social conservatives (i.e. evangelicals), and fiscal conservatives (the Wall Street types and their ilk). Their success was predicated largely on the notion that conservative social values were more or less the norm for most of the country. But that is no longer true. While times may not have changed in the evangelical world, which seems trapped in a perpetual 1987 (for real; watch ANY Christian music video), for the rest of the world they have. Birth control is simply a non-issue to the vast majority of Americans; it is simply accepted that it is legal and widely available.
At its heart, this issue is about what the entire evangelical movement is about: Maintaining the "traditional" social order by making women second-class citizens. They dream of an Ozzie & Harriet America, where handsome, clean-shaven men in suits go to the office while their perfectly coiffed and polished wife takes care of the house and kids. They drive big American cars and have cook-outs in the back yard and play bridge at the neighbors' on Thursdays. The man was the king of his castle, children were seen and not heard, and women knew their place. In other words, Utah.
Seriously, though, that vision of social order is exactly what evangelicals want. Idyllic, white bread America. (Emphasis on the "white"; nonwhites can live in the inner cities, and once in a while a convert might move into a "nice" neighborhood, but that's about it as far as diversity goes in Kingdom Come.) This is one thing that all four of the a**holes sitting on the stage in Arizona last night have in common; they all dream of a return to a past where men, specifically white men, reigned supreme. Men were executives, women were secretaries; men were doctors, women were nurses; men were principals, women were teachers. And so on. These are people who, if you were to suggest that everything in this country started going downhill when John Kennedy was elected, would enthusiastically agree with you.
There is no greater threat to that oppressive social order than the liberation of women. Women having control of their own reproductive destinies? It's déclassé to say "heresy" in public nowadays, but you know they want to. In fact, you get the feeling that if they could still burn people at the stake, they would happily do so.
They are afraid, and well they should be. Theirs is a worldview that ruled for centuries. Under it, women were oppressed and brutalized as a matter of course. They fear a world in which men and women are truly equal, where we compete on an even playing field. Because in their heart of hearts they know they will lose.