“This lawsuit is about one of America’s most cherished freedoms: the freedom to practice one’s religion without government interference,” opens the Notre Dame suit, which was filed Monday. “It is not about whether people have a right to abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception.”

Because the words “abortifacient” or “abortion inducing” sound so scary, the Notre Dame lawsuit makes sure to claim over and over again that, despite a political compromise and executive order specifically exempting abortion coverage from Affordable Care Act provisions, they are being forced to pay for abortion. It claims that “many contraceptives approved by the FDA that qualify under these guidelines cause abortions,” which is false on multiple levels: Even if you believe, as Catholic doctrine does but medical professionals do not, that fertilization, not implantation, constitutes pregnancy, the latest scientific research shows that there’s no evidence that emergency contraception prevents implantation.

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“Our concern is for the privacy of these women and for their health and safety, for which Central Family Planning has shown very little regard,” said Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman – while posting photographs of the documents, partially redacted in black marker, online.

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It was, of course, a lie. Romney was conflating two different pills: emergency contraception, known as the morning-after pill, which prevents a pregnancy; and chemical abortion, or mifepristone, which ends a pregnancy of up to seven weeks' gestation and isn’t covered under the new guidelines. Since both pills were marketed in the U.S. around the same time, even some pro-choicers have gotten confused. But Colorado happens to be the epicenter of people confusing them on purpose. It’s the birthplace of the Personhood movement and home to Focus on the Family, both of which have strategically called emergency contraception "abortion" on the scientifically unproven basis that they could block a fertilized egg from implanting.

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In case you didn't catch on, the sex strike is tongue-in-cheek. Annette Maxberry-Carrara, founder of Liberal Ladies Who Lunch -- the group that proposed the "Access Denied" protest -- tells me with a laugh, “We're not looking at it as a literal strike." But they are making a serious political statement. The event's tagline reads, "If our reproductive choices are denied, so are yours."

You would have to be profoundly tone deaf to not recognize the satire in recent bills proposed by female lawmakers that proclaim "every sperm is sacred" and restrict access to the blue pill. Last month, Oklahoma state Sen. Constance Johnson offered a bill in response to Senate Bill 1433 -- which seriously and nonsatirically holds that a fetus at “every stage of development” has “all the rights, privileges and immunities available to other persons, citizens and residents of this state.” Her proposal states, “[A]ny action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”

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I’d rather hear from the Nigerians with unclaimed millions in African banks than from anyone remotely associated with the Democratic campaign that insists women are the key to victory in 2012. At least at some point there was probably some money in some African bank. The last time women picked a federal government men didn’t want was the midterm election of Bill Clinton in 1996. And that was within the margin of error.

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In the run-up to the meeting, the president of the Bishops’ Conference, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, penned an unambiguously bellicose letter to his fellow bishops on March 2, stating, “We have made it clear in no uncertain terms to the government that we are not at peace with its invasive attempt to curtail the religious freedom we cherish as Catholics and Americans. We did not ask for this fight, but we will not run from it.”

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After all, the insurance guidelines the right has been fighting so fiercely represent the rare constructive movement on reproductive rights by the federal government, but they are not in themselves radical. At the same time as the Affordable Care Act (if it's allowed to go forward) will expand insurance coverage overall, these guidelines will ideally close the gaps in contraceptive access in a few ways that, while significant, won't upend the status quo much. They'll bring into line the lagging states that don't already require employer coverage of birth control -- less than half of them -- make it easier to access more effective forms, and eliminate the co-pay that can be prohibitively expensive and usually falls on women.

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As I argue in "The Reactionary Mind," conservatism is dedicated to defending hierarchies of power against democratic movements from below, particularly in the so-called private spheres of the family and the workplace. Conservatism is a defense of what I call “the private life of power.” Less a protection of privacy or property in the abstract, as many conservatives and libertarians like to claim, conservatism is a defense of the rights of bosses and husbands/fathers.

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It's worth celebrating any time people remember that women’s votes are worth wooing, especially if it comes with a handful of teachable moments about, say, how birth control works, why it matters, and why you might not want to ritually humiliate women, whether they’re testifying before Congress or about to get an abortion. But if Democrats are going to trumpet how great they are for women, it’s worth remembering that the party might be the infinitely lesser of two evils on reproductive rights, but it hasn’t always put women first.

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Alaska's Murkowski is not quite a Snowe-level RINO, but she did rather famously lose a primary election to a Tea Party upstart in 2010, putting her solidly in the "too moderate for the modern Republican Party" camp. (She then won reelection with a rare successful write-in campaign, in part because the Tea Party upstart turned out to be a weird extremist with a history of paranoia and lying.) She is pro-choice. She is obviously pro-contraception. She just voted against those two principles because ... well, because she's a Republican, and it seems like a bunch of Republicans briefly convinced themselves that this issue was a winner, politically.

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Not everyone was surprised. The activists who have for years protested online, in person or in the courts – when women were attacked with fierce misogyny simply for existing in public, when women’s healthcare was stigmatized and subject to punishing double standards, or, for that matter, when seven states passed mandatory ultrasound laws – had another sign to represent them: "I cannot believe I still have to protest this shit." But this time, they weren't drowned out, they were joined with fierce, spontaneous energy. As my colleague Mary Elizabeth Williams put it, though she worries about her daughters facing a "harder and meaner" world for women than the one she grew up in, “I haven't felt this strong a sense of ‘We are not helpless and this is not OK’ in a long time."

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Fluke tried to testify on behalf of President Obama's contraception coverage requirements at Rep. Darrell Issa's Inquisition; excuse me, his hearing on the regulations, which featured an all-male panel to lead off. But she was denied permission, on the grounds that Issa was interested in threats to religious liberty, not women's lives. That was bad enough. After the GOP congressman shut her down, she told her story to House Democrats as well as journalists. Limbaugh called her a "slut" and a "prostitute," and promised to buy Fluke and Georgetown women "as much aspirin to put between their knees as they want. We are paying her for having sex. We are getting screwed. So Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here's the deal: If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I'll tell you what it is: We want you to post the videos online, so we can all watch."

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Where once angry feminists flooded the streets of New York with photogenic protest marches and vowed to “take back the night” on campuses across the nation, now they’re grateful that their penetrator is not the government they elected. Where abortion was legalized and protected in every state in the nation, now they fight the government they elected not to empower their employers to deny them birth control insurance. Where once feminists combined support for the Equal Rights Amendment with campaigns to address the scourge of breast cancer, now they fight their own cancer charity, the Komen Foundation, not to victimize Planned Parenthood.

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It’s far too shortsighted, and worse, dangerously complacent, to measure victory election cycle by election cycle. (Even gaming the outcome of this year’s election is a risky proposition at best.) The opponents of birth control insurance coverage don’t use an election as a metric. Sure, they’d love to win, but even a loss inspires them to redouble their efforts, not to pack up and go home after learning they are on the minority side of public opinion.

They are evangelists. If public opinion isn’t on their side, they’ll strive to change public opinion. They are dogged, well-financed and unrelenting. Their claims about the proper role of religion in governing and policymaking — which Democrats fail to contest forcefully enough — are eroding the separation of church and state, and taking down gains made in access to reproductive healthcare along with it.

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In his recent column in the New York Times, Ross Douthat argues that even though conservatives have failed in selling chastity to the public (even in solidly red states), a remedy he seemingly wants to offer for married couples too, "the liberal narrative has glaring problems as well." What, exactly?

To begin with, a lack of contraceptive access simply doesn’t seem to be a significant factor in unplanned pregnancy in the United States. When the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed more than 10,000 women who had procured abortions in 2000 and 2001, it found that only 12 percent cited problems obtaining birth control as a reason for their pregnancies. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of teenage mothers found similar results: Only 13 percent of the teens reported having had trouble getting contraception."

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But it's worth looking at what he said right before that: "I get such a chuckle when these things come out.  Here we have millions of our fellow Americans unemployed, we have jihadist camps being set up in Latin America, which Rick has been warning about, and people seem to be so preoccupied with sex that I think it says something about our culture. We maybe need a massive therapy session so we can concentrate on what the real issues are."

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A university chaplain, he no doubt understood how the combination of Rome’s authoritarianism and theological nit-picking tended to drive educated young people from the church. Anyway, everybody knows how that worked out. Next came Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s 1968 doubling down on the church’s blanket condemnation of artificial means of birth control — a blast from the medieval past as most American Catholics now see it.

“Vatican Roulette,” we called it, and like the vast majority, declined to play. Surveys have shown that approximately 13 percent of the faithful agree with the Roman Catholic Church’s categorical ban on birth control; a mere 2 percent actually practice what the bishops preach. For most, it isn’t a serious personal issue. Sure, Your Grace, whatever.

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