Bishop William Lori, the chairman of the Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty and star of the all-male Republican hearings on “religious freedom,” mildly told the Religion News Service that the bishops “are not looking for a fight with the administration.” Although the statement they issued after the administrative meeting employed softer language than Dolan’s letter, the battle lines already have been drawn. The bishops didn’t mince words: There will be no retreat from their efforts to persuade the public and policymakers and press their agenda in the courts and legislatures.

Some Catholics who early on helped drive the bishops’ agenda are having second thoughts, but just about the conference’s overheated rhetoric. Michael Sean Winters and E.J. Dionne, two Catholic Democrats who played a crucial role in elevating the bishops’ complaints about the contraception coverage requirement, are now giving cover to some of the bishops’ policy demands, even as they scold them for their bombast.

Winters, whose recent book about how a religious fundamentalist named Falwell shaped the modern GOP is drawing attention from liberal groups, has his own religious intentions for the Democrats. After warning in January of a political apocalypse for Obama should he fail to relent to the bishops, Winters this week pleaded with them to dial back their jeremiad. Dionne, for his part, warned the bishops not to become “the Tea Party at prayer.” Winters lamented that the Bishops’ Conference “has made a hash of things since the President announced his accommodation.” (Winters and Dionne want, in a word, the bishops to be attractive to Democrats rather than Republicans. But it is, no doubt, too late.)

It may be too late for Winters to curry favor with his fellow Democrats, too, since he declared after the administration announced, on Jan. 20, that all employers, save houses of worship, would have to provide the contraception insurance coverage, that President Obama “lost my vote yesterday … The issue of conscience protections is so foundational, I do not see how I ever could, in good conscience, vote for this man again.”

This was intended, of course, as a shot across the bow, an ominous warning that the elusive Catholic vote could slip through the Democrats’ fingers. Dionne, who initially said Obama had “botched” the decision, argued this week, “the bishops have legitimate concerns about the Obama compromise, including how to deal with self-insured entities and whether the wording of the HHS rule still fails to recognize the religious character of the church’s charitable work.”

Winters also contends the accommodation is “insufficient, most obviously because it fails to deal with self-insured Catholic institutions but most worrisomely because it leaves in tact [sic] the classification of exempt organizations that draws a distinction between houses of worship and religious ministries.”

But the bishops and their allies want to take the objection much further than exemptions for the self-insured institutions. Winters, for his part, acknowledges that federal law already treats houses of worship differently: Houses of worship have always been exempt from the contraception coverage requirement, and in other areas of the law, they are exempt, for example, from filing tax returns. Religiously affiliated institutions that are not houses of worship, though, are treated just like secular ones for these purposes. Winters argues that they, too, should be treated like houses of worship, an outcome that would have implications across the large number of charities, social services organizations, hospitals and educational institutions that are affiliated with the church or identify as Catholic.

At the Conference of Bishops’ blog, Sister Mary Anne Walsh complains that the Amish as well as Christian healthcare-sharing ministries received exemptions from the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, but Catholics can’t receive an exemption from the contraception coverage. She seems to have some regrets: “If only we objected to health insurance generally, we might be able to enjoy the same protection.”

The bishops, though, were apparently too busy lobbying against the nonexistent abortion coverage in the healthcare reform bill to notice that healthcare-sharing ministries were lobbying for an exemption from the individual mandate entirely. (Take note, too, of religious organizations’ exemption from the Lobbying Disclosure Act, so we don’t know even the minimal amount of information about their lobbying activities secular organizations are required to disclose.) It’s precisely these sorts of religious exemptions, tucked away in expansive pieces of legislation like the Affordable Care Act, that chip away at a secular government and create two sets of rules: one for the religious entities with lobbyists and one for everyone else.

Religious exemptions, and separate sets of rules, have a ripple effect. An example: Thanks to the efforts of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), healthcare-sharing ministries are exempt from insurance regulations in many states. Because of the exemptions, consumers of HCSMs lack the protections and legal recourse the regulations provide. We may never how some healthcare-sharing ministries affect consumers because their contracts prohibit members from suing them in court, requiring religiously based arbitration instead.

At least consumers choose to join a healthcare-sharing ministry. Employees of religious institutions do not choose to adopt the institution’s religious faith. If you work at a Catholic institution, you should be forced, the bishops contend, to live with their religious edicts, because doing otherwise violates the employer’s religious freedom.

But as Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna showed at the Forward recently, this elevation of the supposed religious freedom rights of employers has a coercive effect on their employees. By refusing an exemption to employers, Sarna writes, the government “reasonably assumes that employers and employees both have First Amendment rights, including the ‘no establishment’ right not to be religiously coerced.”

The bishops, though, argue that the government is coercing them. They point to a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, which unanimously held that employees who meet a denomination’s own definition of “ministerial employee” may not sue for wrongful termination under employment discrimination laws. Cardinal Dolan, in his letter, seems to think this ruling, seen by constitutional experts as narrowly limited to the circumstances of the case, would permit the church to unilaterally expand its own exemptions: “the Supreme Court unanimously defended the right of a Church to define its own ministry and services, a dramatic rebuff to the administration, apparently unheeded by the White House.”

Congressional Republicans might see bills like the Blunt Amendment — which, if passed, would have allowed any employer to opt out of covering any medical care to which it had a moral or religious objection — as too risky for an election year. But the bishops and their Catholic and evangelical allies are bound and determined to continue their battle, as polemicists and lobbyists, as litigators in court and in the court of public opinion. Their sights are on contraception coverage at the moment, but in the long term, they are eyeing much more.

Among other things, they’ve signaled their intent to demand exemptions from federal contracting requirements that their services to sex trafficking victims or HIV/AIDS patients not include full reproductive care, and have consistently raised, even in the face of exemptions for houses of worship, religious freedom objections to same-sex marriage laws. In the bishops’ minds, they are victims of a meddling government that seeks to denigrate their religious raison d’être, and after this week’s meeting they’ve reiterated, once again, that will continue to “protect the religious freedom that is rightly ours.” If exercising this “religious freedom” prevents other people from exercising theirs, the bishops don’t much care.

And yet, incredibly, this has still somehow become a debate about either the morality of women who use contraception or whether employers should be explicitly barred from firing their employees for using it. That would be the ACLU’s concern about a new bill in Arizona. Back in 2002, that state passed a contraceptive coverage mandate with an opt-out only for explicitly religious employers that serve co-religionists — in other words, a narrower definition than the post-accommodation federal one. Now, the Arizona legislature is seriously debating whether employers should be able to ask their employees their reasons for using birth control.

You don’t have to go back to decades-old quotes from Richard Nixon or George H. W. Bush supporting federal funding of family planning (although those are illuminating) to realize how far the debate on contraception has shifted. You can merely go back to 2005. That was the last time the Equity in Prescription Insurance and Contraceptive Coverage Act (EPICC) was before the Senate. First introduced in 1997, it was co-sponsored in the Senate by Olympia Snowe and would have required health insurance plans to cover contraception on the thinking that doing otherwise would discriminate against women. Insurance coverage of the then-recently-approved Viagra provided yet another effective talking point about fairness — “the perfect foil,” as Gloria Feldt, then the president of Planned Parenthood, put it. Even the slogan that Planned Parenthood adopted around that time, “Cover my pills,” was tonally distinct from now, when it would probably be taken as a Slut’s Manifesto.

Fast forward to two weeks ago. Snowe, now about to retire, was the only member of her party to oppose the Blunt amendment, which would have allowed any employer to deny contraceptive or other insurance coverage on the basis of religious objection. This made her, comparatively speaking, a lone voice of sanity on an intended rollback of women’s access to healthcare, but only because she had nothing to lose. Talk about moved goalposts.

In the ’90s and early 2000s, the conversation was driven by discussions of fairness and equality, based on the statistic that women of reproductive age spent 68 percent more than men on out-of-pocket health care costs. Throughout the ’90s, women denied contraceptive coverage by their employers (not necessarily for religious reasons) sued them, often successfully: Since 2001, several courts have found that employers not covering contraception were violating Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting sex discrimination.

“It’s a great fight,” recalled Feldt, who fought the first round on contraception insurance coverage as president of Planned Parenthood from 1996 to 2005. “It shows how mean they are, how lacking in compassion, that what they’re really about has nothing to do with abortion or the health of anyone; it has to do with controlling women.”

Back then, religious objections were discussed, but as former White House staffer and current president of the Center for American Progress Neera Tanden recalled in a New Republic piece this week about the 1990s roots of this debate, it “was far from the cries of ‘religious coercion’ that we see today.” It’s odd that Tanden says ”the Catholic Church did not actively resist” a New York state law that only exempted houses of worship from contraceptive coverage, since Catholic Charities went to state court and lost three times. The real difference appears to have been that those objections were relatively marginal compared to today, with most of the Republican party currently racing to take the same position.

EPICC failed, but in 1998, Representative Nita Lowey, who had co-sponsored it in the House, successfully got a contraceptive mandate for federal employees’ insurance plans into an appropriations bill. In today’s whacked-out terms of debate, that would be 8 million people potentially being “paid to have sex.” Instead, a Republican congresswoman, Nancy Johnson of Connecticut, scathingly said of U.S. Rep. Chris Smith’s position that hormonal contraception should be considered abortion that “for us to make the decision that that woman must choose a means of contraception that reflects any one individual’s determination as to when in that process of conception life actually begins is a level of intrusion into conscience, into independence, into freedom that frankly I have never witnessed.” Guess which one of them is still in the House.

As recently as 2001, George W. Bush’s attempt to eliminate that federal employee mandate was ”resoundingly rejected” by Congress; there was only an ideological case to be made for the nation’s largest employer not covering contraceptions, since the government “reported that it experienced no increase in costs at all” from the policy. Meanwhile, in the absence of broader federal action, some states got to work with their own contraceptive coverage mandates, starting with Maryland in 1998. As of now, according to Guttmacher, 28 states have some form of mandate to cover contraceptives, though 20 of them have some form of exemption. Only eight states in total have “expansive” refusal clauses that have a broader definition of religious organizations, “including at least some hospitals” who can refuse to cover contraception on their insurance plans.

Now, with this fresh round of birth control opposition in the states, including both legislative and legal action, even that can’t be taken for granted. That’s partly because the debate has been so realigned; as Corey Robin put it, “Rather than openly pursue their agenda of restricting the rights of women, the GOP claims to be defending the rights of religious dissenters. Instead of powerful employers—for that is what many of these Catholic hospitals and universities are—we have persecuted sects.”

And as Sarah Posner has pointed out, recent polls on support for contraceptive coverage show conflicting levels of support, depending on the way the question is framed. On Monday, a New York Times/CBS poll had 51 percent of respondents saying that employers should be able to opt-out, and when a “religious affiliation” was added to the question, 57 percent said there should be an opt-out. But on Wednesday, a Bloomberg poll found that 57 percent of men and 68 percent of women said contraceptive coverage is about women’s health, while 38 percent of men and 28 percent of women said it was a matter of religious liberty. On contraception, if not consistently on abortion rights, Democrats have rightly chosen to throw in their lot with facts and public health on the assumption that the female vote will follow, but the depth and, more recently, breadth of opposition should not be underestimated.

The mainstreaming of anti-woman extremism within the Republican party is a fact of life that, most recently, Mitt Romney has had to come to terms with. “It’s the result of the far ideological right using the democratic process, precinct by precinct,” says Feldt. “We really can’t fault them for doing that, but [pro-choicers] need to use it more and better than they do.” She adds, “We’re really good at reacting” — as evidenced by the massive backlash to right-wing overreaching of the past few weeks — “but we’re not so good at seeing the long term.” In her view, that would mean reviving the long-stalled Freedom of Choice Act, the basic principle of which is that government cannot discriminate against a woman based on reproductive status, as part of a more proactive reshaping of the debate. As wonderful as all the satirical “every sperm is sacred” bills are — the seeds of which, so to speak, were planted in the 90s Viagra comparison — those conversations about “freedom” can go the other way too.

In her 2004 book “The War On Choice,” Feldt credits one of her former staffers, then 28, with calling out the unfairness in insurers not covering contraceptives back in the mid-1990s. “For years, I had unthinkingly paid for my birth control out of my own pocket, just glad to have it,” Feldt wrote. “But this was a new generation, asking new questions, demanding new progress. Why wasn’t the birth control pill covered like any other prescription drug?” Less than a generation later, it’s starting to feel like we’re back at square one.

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.

So it’s no surprise that the chief agenda items of the GOP since its string of Tea Party victories in 2010 have been to roll back the rights of workers — not just in the public sector, as this piece by Gordon Lafer makes clear, but also in the private sector — and to roll back the reproductive rights of women, as this chart, which Mike Konczal discusses, makes clear. Often, it’s the same Tea Party-controlled states that are pushing both agendas at the same time.

What I hadn’t predicted was that the GOP would be able to come up with a program, in the form of this anti-birth control employer legislation we’re now seeing everywhere, that would combine both agenda items at the same time.

I should have foreseen this fusion because, as I argued in my first book, “Fear: The History of a Political Idea,” in the United States it has historically fallen to employers rather than the state to police the political opinions and practices of citizens. Focused as we are on the state, we often miss the fact that some of the most intense programs of political indoctrination have not been conducted by the government but have instead been outsourced to the private sector. While fewer than 200 men and women went to jail for their political beliefs during the McCarthy years, as many as two out of every five American workers were monitored for their political beliefs.

Recall this fascinating exchange between an American physician and Tocqueville during the  latter’s travels to the United States in the early 1830s. Passing through Baltimore, Tocqueville asked the doctor why so many Americans pretended they were religious when they obviously had “numerous doubts on the subject of dogma.” The doctor replied that the clergy had a lot of power in America, as in Europe. But where the European clergy often acted through or with the help of the state, their American counterparts worked through the making and breaking of private careers.

If a minister, known for his piety, should declare that in his opinion a certain man was an unbeliever, the man’s career would almost certainly be broken. Another example: A doctor is skilful, but has no faith in the Christian religion. However, thanks to his abilities, he obtains a fine practice. No sooner is he introduced into the house than a zealous Christian, a minister or someone else, comes to see the father of the house and says: look out for this man. He will perhaps cure your children, but he will seduce your daughters, or your wife, he is an unbeliever. There, on the other hand, is Mr. So-and-So. As good a doctor as this man, he is at the same time religious. Believe me, trust the health of your family to him. Such counsel is almost always followed.

While all of us rightly value the Bill of Rights, it’s important to note that these amendments are limitations on government action. As a result, the tasks of political repression and coercion can often be — and are — simply outsourced to the private sector. As I wrote in “Fear“:

There is little mystery as to why civil society can serve as a substitute or supplement to state repression. Civil society is not, on the whole, subject to restrictions like the Bill of Rights. So what the state is forbidden to do, private actors in civil society may execute instead. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” Justice Jackson famously declared, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” But what star in our constitutional constellation forbids newspapers like the New York Times, which refused during the McCarthy years to hire members of the Communist Party, from prescribing such orthodoxy as a condition of employment? What in the Constitution would stop a publisher from telling poet Langston Hughes that it would not issue his “Famous Negro Music Makers“ unless he removed any discussion of Communist singer Paul Robeson? Or stop Little, Brown from refusing to publish best-selling Communist author Howard Fast?

The Sixth Amendment guarantees “in all criminal prosecutions” that the accused shall “have the assistance of counsel for his defence.” But what in the Constitution would prevent attorney Abe Fortas, who would later serve on the Supreme Court, from refusing to represent a party member during the McCarthy years because, in his words, “We have decided that we don’t think we can ever afford to represent anybody that has ever been a Communist?”

The Fifth Amendment stipulates that the government cannot compel an individual to incriminate herself, but it does not forbid private employers from firing anyone invoking its protections before congressional committees. To the extent that our Constitution works against an intrusive state, how can it even authorize the government to regulate these private decisions of civil society? What the liberal state granteth, then, liberal civil society taketh away.

Let’s come back now to the birth control employer question. Thanks to the gains of the feminist movement and Griswold v. Connecticut, we now understand the Constitution to prohibit the government from imposing restrictions on access to birth control. Even most Republicans, I think, accept that. But there’s nothing in the Constitution to stop employers from refusing to provide health insurance coverage for birth control to their employees.

And here’s where the McCarthy specter becomes particularly troubling. Notice the second provision of the Arizona legislation: Employers will now have the right to question their employees about what they plan to do with their birth-control prescriptions. Not only is this a violation of the right to privacy — again, not a right our Constitution currently recognizes in the workplace — but it obviously can give employers the necessary information they need to fire an employee.  If a women admits to using contraception in order to not get pregnant, there’s nothing in the Constitution to stop an anti-birth control employer from firing her.

During the McCarthy years, here were some of the questions employers asked their employees: What is your opinion of the Marshall Plan? What do you think about NATO? The Korean War? Reconciliation with the Soviet Union? These questions were directly related to U.S. foreign policy, the assumption being that Communist Party members or sympathizers would offer pro-Soviet answers to them (i.e., against NATO and the Korean War). But many of the questions were more domestic in nature: What do you think of civil rights? Do you own Paul Robeson records? What do you think about segregating the Red Cross blood supply? The Communist Party had taken strong positions on civil rights, including desegregating the Red Cross blood supply, and as one questioner put it, “The fact that a person believes in racial equality doesn’t prove that he’s a Communist, but it certainly makes you look twice, doesn’t it? You can’t get away from the fact that racial equality is part of the Communist line.” (Though Ellen Schrecker, from whose book “Many Are the Crimes“ I have taken these examples, points out that many of these questions were posed by government loyalty boards, she also notes that the questions posed by private employers were virtually identical.) The upshot, of course, was that support for civil rights came to be viewed as a Communist position, making public support for civil rights a riskier proposition than it already was.

It’s unclear what the future of birth control McCarthyism will be, but anyone who thinks the repressive implications of these bills can be simply brushed aside with vague feints to the religious freedoms of employers — more on this in a moment — is overlooking the long and sordid history of Fear, American-Style. Private employers punishing their employees for holding disfavored views or engaging in disapproved practices (disapproved by the employer, that is) is the way a lot of repression happens in this country. And it can have toxic effects, as Liza Love, a witness before the Arizona Senate committee, testified:

“I wouldn’t mind showing my employer my medical records,” Love said. “But there are 10 women behind me that would be ashamed to do so.”

In the debate over the legislation, Arizona Republican Majority Whip Debbie Lesko (also the bill’s author) said, “I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the  Soviet Union.” She’s right, though perhaps not in the way she intended: Unlike in the Soviet Union, the government here may not be able to punish you simply for holding unorthodox views or engaging in disfavored practices (though the government can certainly find other ways to harass or penalize you, if it wishes). What happens instead is that your employer will do it for the government (or for him- or herself). As the president of Barnard College put it during the McCarthy years, “If the colleges take the responsibility to do their own house cleaning, Congress would not feel it has to investigate.”

The standard line from Republicans and some libertarians is that requiring religious or religion-related employers (like the hospitals and universities that are funded by the Catholic Church) to provide health insurance coverage for their employees’ birth control is a violation of their First Amendment rights to religious freedom. The same arguments have come up in Arizona. Just after she made the comparison above between the United States and the Soviet Union, Lesko added:

“So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.”

…

“My whole legislation is about our First Amendment rights and freedom of religion,” Lesko said. “All my bill does is that an employer can opt out of the mandate if they have any religious objections.”

…

Father John Muir, a priest at the All Saints Catholic Newman Center on the Tempe campus, said the controversial issue is not about birth control, but religious freedom and the First Amendment.

“It’s not about birth control,” Muir said. “It’s about the right to live out your beliefs and principles without inference by the state.”

There are many reasons to be wary of this line of argument, but the history of the Christian right provides perhaps the most important one of all. It’s often forgotten that one of the main catalysts for the rise of the Christian right was not school prayer or abortion but the defense of Southern private schools that were created in response to desegregation. By 1970, 400,000 white children were attending these “segregation academies.” States like Mississippi gave students tuition grants, and until the Nixon administration overturned the practice, the IRS gave the donors to these schools tax exemptions. And it was none other than Richard Viguerie, founder of the New Right and pioneer of its use of direct-mail tactics, who said that the attack on these public subsidies by the civil rights movement and liberal courts “was the spark that ignited the religious right’s involvement in real politics.”

According to historian Joseph Crespino, whose essay “Civil Rights and the Religious Right” in “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s“ is must reading, the rise of segregation academies “was often timed exactly with the desegregation of formerly all-white public schools.” Even so, their advocates claimed to be defending religious minorities — and religious beliefs — rather than white supremacy. (Initially nonsectarian, most of these schools became evangelical over time.) Their cause, in other words, was freedom, not inequality; not the freedom of whites to associate with other whites (and thereby lord their status and power over blacks), as the previous generation of massive resisters had foolishly and openly admitted, but the freedom of believers to practice their own embattled religion. It was a shrewd transposition. In one fell swoop, the heirs of slaveholders became the descendants of persecuted Baptists, and Jim Crow a heresy the First Amendment was meant to protect.

So it is today. Rather than openly pursue their agenda of restricting the rights of women, the GOP claims to be defending the rights of religious dissenters. Instead of powerful employers — for that is what many of these Catholic hospitals and universities are — we have persecuted sects.

Knowing the history of the rise of the Christian right doesn’t resolve this debate, but it certainly does make you look twice, doesn’t it?

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.

“Women can’t let Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum or any other Republican take away our rights and focus on issues that distract from putting more money in women’s pockets to provide for their families,” Wasserman Schultz said in a conference call this morning with bloggers and reporters. She added, “Romney’s race to the right may be winning him Tea Party votes, but he’s losing support from women by alienating them with his policies.”

Meanwhile, new polling commissioned by EMILY’s List and Planned Parenthood backs up the notion that an amendment (now dead) proposed by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., that would have allowed employers to refuse any insurance coverage on the basis of “conscience” was politically poisonous: “53 percent of Independents and 40 percent of Republican voters will be less likely to vote for a candidate who has supported the Blunt amendment.”

As it happens, in what was mostly a party-line vote, three Democrats – Bob Casey, Ben Nelson and Joe Manchin, two of them up for reelection – effectively voted on behalf of the Blunt amendment, the same one Wasserman Schultz called “dangerous” today. When I asked her to account for that, and whether advocates for women’s health could expect Democrats’ advocacy to outlast an election year, Wasserman Schultz said, “Three is infinitesimally small compared to the overwhelming majority of the Democratic Party. We’re a big-tent party. We have a lot of variety in our opinions.” And she cited the other key prongs of the Obama case to women: the appointments of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan; the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and the Affordable Care Act – not just the contraceptive coverage mandate that has dominated headlines, but also “the fact that having ovaries will no longer be considered a pre-existing condition,” as Wasserman Schultz put it.

Not mentioned: The Obama administration’s shameful capitulation on making emergency contraception more available to all women, and the debacle in Congress over that same Affordable Care Act’s abortion-coverage provisions, driven by antiabortion Democrats. (“Stupak,” after the anti-choice Democratic congressman who gave his name to that amendment, is currently a popular term in the Urban Dictionary synonymous with “throwing women under the bus.” Bart Stupak left Congress and is now a lobbyist.)  As Frances Kissling pointed out in this space, making room in that “big tent” for stridently anti-choice Democrats was a matter of strategy to get to a majority at all costs. Given that the Republican-controlled House is still busily debating abortion restrictions, held back only by a Democratic Senate and presidency, that’s no small matter. But if women end up handing Obama a second term, it’s worth asking for more in return.

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.

Then she went home to Alaska for the Iditarod, and according to the Anchorage Daily News, a bunch of her supporters gave her what-for.

“I have never had a vote I’ve taken where I have felt that I let down more people that believed in me,” she said.

She’d meant to make a statement about religious freedom, she said, but voters read it as a vote against contraception coverage for women. The measure was so broad, it’s hard not to read it that way. I suspect Murkowski saw that, but for reasons she didn’t share with me, voted for it anyway.

Yeah, that isn’t a great excuse. Two weeks ago Murkowski was aligning herself with the conservative Catholic bishops and practically adopting the “Obama’s war on religion” talking point. Professional moderates like her are always shifting according to the prevailing political winds, but they usually don’t reverse themselves so definitively quite so quickly. And it is an especially bad look to do so less than week after a controversial vote.

It should be clear that there’s not actually room in the current party for pro-choice women — it’s clear to Snowe, it’s fair to say — and attempts by these 14 sad members of Congress to balance their needs to actually represent their constituencies with their responsibilities to party leadership will only get more difficult. The GOP basically just took a 40-year step back on reproductive rights, and everyone in the party who disagrees with that decision should have probably actively resisted it instead of apologizing after the fact.