The "War on Women" Is At Best a Stalemate

The Dems thought they'd found Nirvana when they were able to turn their made-for-TV event featuring Sandra Fluke into an attack on Rush Limbaugh and a new "war on women" by Republicans.  Well, so much for that.  The whole thing is fading rather quickly:

If you've been watching Democratic operatives, liberal bloggers, and cable news for the last month or so, you'd get the impression that the so-called "war on women" will be the Republican Party's Waterloo. Specifically, you'd get the impression that it's a big loser for the GOP (and a handful of Democrats) to push to let employers continue choosing (as they can now) whether to provide contraceptive coverage.

After Rush Limbaugh's inartful and offensive comments about Sandra Fluke -- one of the activists working for state-mandated contraceptive coverage -- I certainly believed that this argument was lost in the political realm, and that Catholic businessmen and religious institutions would have to rely on the courts to preserve First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.

But then new polls began to come out suggesting that this issue isn't the boon that the social Left would have you think it is. It is hard to tell -- the polls on the issue have been very fickle and perhaps even contradictory, depending largely on how the question is asked. But there's an easier way to see how the debate is affecting the presidential race, and that's to look at how President Obama is doing overall. He actually lost a bit of ground among women as this debate occurred, the latest ABC/Washington Post's poll showed.

Fortunately, most people are smart enough to realize the issue here is not that Rush Limbaugh called a 30-year old who wants her birth control paid by someone else a "slut", but that the Obama administration is demanding that religious organizations violate their moral beliefs in order to meet some liberal priority. Most voters understand that the attack on religious freedom is far more important than what some talk show host says.