On birth control, GOP families: tough luck

Seen from a certain altitude — that of Washington wits far removed from most crises of family life — the emerging Republican campaign against birth control is merely a weapon in the party's campaign against the new health care law.

Don't kid yourself.

Don't even think of this deadly serious silliness as another step in the GOP's war against women.

That doesn't go far enough. This time, the Republicans are aiming at families – families too stressed to handle another child or too strapped to afford one.

If you're a parent in such a fix, this is the Republican message: tough luck.

But take a moment to admire the GOP, that supposedly pro-family party, for its whacky contradictions; abortion is what results when a woman can't afford a baby and, without birth control, gets pregnant. Food stamps are what you get when your paycheck doesn't go far enough to feed every mouth at the table.

And admire Florida's own Marco Rubio. Our ambitious junior U.S. Senator launched this deadly serious silliness in late January, with a bill that would exempt any employer from offering health insurance coverage for birth control if the boss is opposed to it for religious or moral reasons.

Now the GOP is going further. It has sanitized Rubio's language and turned it into an amendment the party wants to tack on to a highway bill. The amendment would permit any employer — not just religious ones, like the Catholic groups that won concessions from President Obama on the contraception issue — to refuse to cover any procedure, any drug, that the employer morally opposes, whatever that means.

Just politics?

Not on your life.

Florida has a fledgling personhood movement. Rubio is often mentioned as vice-presidential candidate. And medieval Rick Santorum, who is on the verge of eclipsing Mitt Romney among the Republican presidential candidates, says birth control is just plain wrong.

Santorum has dismissed contraception as a minor expense that people can easily afford. Some checking at a Tampa Wal-Mart pharmacy showed that Yaz, a popular oral contraceptive, costs $94 a month, and its generic costs $68. That could help cover a week of groceries for many families. But who's counting?

Certainly not the GOP.

It's hard to see how the Republicans will stop themselves, even though virtually all American women have used birth control and a solid majority of people endorse its use. The Republicans would have to backpedal dramatically, and they are not a crowd prone to backing down. Instead, they seem to enjoy their perch on the edge of a political cliff. The trouble is, they may take America's families with them when they tumble over it.