Last month in this space I discussed the New York Times
editorial page’s enthusiastic support for the Obama
administration’s birth-control insurance mandate. Since I filed
that column, liberal politicians, reporters, and commentators have
turned the issue into one of the most vivid examples of the Taranto
Principle since John Kerry’s campaign for president.
The Taranto Principle holds that the liberal media often ill
serve liberal politicians by creating a feedback loop in which both
sides reinforce each other’s prejudices while public opinion goes
its own way. In retrospect, the contraceptive mandate was perfectly
suited to trigger the principle. Birth control is widely practiced
and almost universally accepted, so Democrats figured as long as
they could obscure the issue of religious liberty, the public would
take their side.
They got encouragement from Rick Santorum, who by then had
emerged as Mitt Romney’s chief rival for the Republican
presidential nomination, and who was not shy about expressing his
personal agreement with the Catholic Church’s position that birth
control is immoral and has had deleterious social consequences.
Even some conservative commentators, like Jennifer Rubin of the
Washington Post, were horrified. “The impression that
Santorum finds the prevalent practice of birth control ‘harmful to
women’ is, frankly, mind-numbing,” she wrote on February 15. Never
mind that Santorum said he does not think birth control should be
forbidden by law, or that such a law would be unconstitutional
anyway under longstanding Supreme Court precedent.
On February 16, Democrats in Congress staged a publicity stunt.
That day the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a
hearing on the Obamacare contraception mandate and its implications
for religious liberty. Democrats originally chose Barry Lynn of
Americans United for Separation of Church and State to testify for
the anti-religious-liberty side. Then they sandbagged the
Republicans. They asked, too late, for Sandra Fluke, a 30-year-old
student at Georgetown Law School, to be subbed in for Lynn, and
they told Lynn not to bother showing up. When the hearing took
place, Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York demanded: “Where are the
women?” Although it was the Dems who chose Lynn over Fluke, and the
second panel of witnesses included two female members, liberal
media dutifully propagated the “Republican sexism” charge. A week
later, House Democrats held a mock hearing where Fluke
testified.
On February 17, Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Alter declared that
social liberalism had triumphed:
Contraception is now the elephant in the bedroom—the issue that
no one in the Republican establishment wants to talk about because
they know it’s a disaster for them.…The independent women who will
help determine the election want the government—and their
bosses—out of their private lives. The culture wars are over, and
the Republicans lost.
There were some problems with this narrative. Like Cindy
Sheehan, Fluke was a left-wing activist cast in the role of
everywoman (or as much of an “everywoman” as a student at an elite
law school can be). “Fluke has a long history of feminist
advocacy,” reported Caroline May of the Daily Caller:
While [an undergraduate] at Cornell, Fluke’s organized
activities centered on the far-left feminist and gender equity
movements. Fluke participated in rallies supporting abortion,
protests against war in Iraq and efforts to recruit other womens’
[sic] rights activists to campus.
Fluke even got a bachelor’s degree in something called
“Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies.”
In her testimony, Fluke asserted that “without insurance
coverage, contraception…can cost a woman more than $3,000 during
law school.” The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack called
the local Target store and found that its price for a month’s
supply of generic birth-control pills was $9, without insurance, a
total of $324 for three years.
Thus this dishonest distraction was already well under way by
Wednesday, February 29, when Rush Limbaugh famously joked: “What
does it say about…Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee
and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does
that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a
prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much
sex she can’t afford the contraception.”
That Saturday, Limbaugh acknowledged his mistake: “My choice of
words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I
created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the
insulting word choices.” No doubt it was satisfying to the left to
have brought Limbaugh to heel, something that isn’t easy to do. And
it’s true that Limbaugh’s ill-chosen words magnified the Fluke
distraction.
But whereas distractions are evanescent, the religious-liberty
issue hadn’t gone away. On March 1, the day after Fluke testified,
the Democrat-controlled Senate passed up an opportunity to blunt
the issue, rejecting by a 51-48 procedural vote, with only four
senators crossing party lines, an amendment that would have allowed
conscience exemptions to the Obamacare contraception mandate. At
least four vulnerable Democratic senators seeking re-election—Bill
Nelson of Florida, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of
Montana, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio—had gone on record against
religious liberty.
Reporters demanded that Romney and Santorum vigorously denounce
Limbaugh; they demurred. In a March 2 Forbes.com column, the
usually centrist Democratic pollster Doug Schoen jumped on the
socially liberal bandwagon:
In light of yesterday’s defeat in the Senate of the “Respect for
Rights of Conscience Act,” aka the Blunt Amendment it is clear that
the GOP has simply pushed the contraception fight too far.…And as
we move ahead toward November, it is almost certain that the issue
of access to contraception will only further help the Democrats
with moderate and independent women in swing states.
The public turned out to have a mind of its own. On March 13, a
New York Times/CBS News poll found that Obama’s approval
rating had dropped to 41 percent from 50 percent a month earlier.
The Times story on the poll explained that the change reflected
“volatility” and stressed that “polls capture only a particular
moment in time.” About the media frenzy of the preceding month, the
story said only this:
In recent weeks, there has been much debate over the
government’s role in guaranteeing insurance coverage for
contraception, including for those who work for religious
organizations. The poll found that women were split as to whether
health insurance plans should cover the costs of birth control and
whether employers with religious objections should be able to opt
out.
Actually, the poll found that by 51 percent to 40 percent,
respondents believed employers should “be allowed to opt out of
covering [birth control] based on religious or moral objections.”
The gap grew when the question referred specifically to religiously
affiliated institutions, with 57 percent favoring an opt-out and
only 36 percent opposing it.
That is, a majority agreed with the Blunt Amendment, while
barely a third supported the Obama position, which the media had
trumpeted as a sure winner—and which, at this writing, it looks
impossible for the president to reverse without infuriating his
political base.
If Obama is re-elected, it will be in spite of, not because of,
his promise of an abortifacient in every pot. If not, it will be in
part because he believed the liberal media’s false assurances that
the public was on his side.
