President Barack Obama called a Georgetown Law School student Friday from the Oval Office to offer her his support after radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh tore into her for testifying before Congress that she backed the administration's policy on health care coverage for contraceptives.

The conservative icon called Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" on his show earlier this week and suggested that if she wanted free birth control, she should post sex tapes online "so we can all watch."

The remarks set off a firestorm of controversy, with congressional Democrats and progressive and women's groups demanding that Republicans repudiate Limbaugh's remarks — while fundraising off them. Some groups called for his advertisers to pull their spots, and several did. Mortgage lender Quicken Loans tweeted that "due to continued inflammatory comments — along w/valuable feedback from clients & team members" it was suspending its advertising on Limbaugh's show.

The furor over contraceptives is one that Democrats think will help them in November. The White House embraced it Friday, calling Limbaugh's remarks "reprehensible," "crude" and "inappropriate." Spokesman Jay Carney said Obama wanted to express his support to Fluke as well as his "appreciation for her willingness to stand tall and express her opinion.

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If you have been surprised to see an uptight prig such as Rick Santorum leading the Republican primary field in national polls, you shouldn’t be. Recent events have demonstrated that conservative positions on social issues are as much about repressing women and reversing the gains of the women’s movement as they are about saving the lives of the unborn.

The young people I saw at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington the week before last looked to me exactly like what you would expect from a bunch of college Republicans. They were dorks. They wore suits. Maybe some of the women’s suit skirts were short, but I was hardly scandalized.

But we learned last week that much of the conservative movement is still living in a different century—and I don’t mean the twentieth—with regard to women’s sexuality. Conservative bloggers were horrified that some young women at CPAC were dressed provocatively and engaged in loose sexual behavior with the young men in attendance.

CPAC has a well-deserved reputation for being the time of year when earnest young conservatives unbutton their Oxford shirts, crack open a few Busch Lights and let loose. I see nothing wrong with that. But Erick Erickson, who runs the popular blog Red State, does. He wrote a lament that CPAC has gotten too debauched: “Young men, regardless of political persuasion or ideology, are intent on having sex, being boys, getting drunk—doing what young men in college often do. All to [sic] often there are also a few young ladies willing to shame their parents if their parents only knew.”

Erickson’s commentary is such a caricature of an avuncular misogynist that it’s amazing his post isn’t actually a parody. He almost literally says, “Boys ...

Rick Santorum is the latest darling of the most extreme of the GOP's extremist voters. Here's just an earful of this guy's moral piety.

Let's start where it all starts for us humans: conception. Not only does Santorum insist that life begins at the instant that a sperm contacts an egg, he also wants to preserve the sanctity of sperm itself by outlawing birth control. Yes, every sperm counts. Last October, he warned about "the dangers of contraception in this country…It's not OK. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

Indeed, Ayatollah Rick is a bit obsessed with what you might be doing in your bedroom. The Supreme Court, he asserts, was wrong to rule that we have a right to consensual sex in our homes. "Then you have the right to bigamy," he wails, "the right to polygamy…to incest…adultery…the right to anything." Then comes his punch line: "This right to privacy doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution."

In a January interview on CNN, the sanctimonious ...

In a dramatic scene on Capitol Hill, several Democrats walked out of a congressional hearing on the Obama administration’s rule that would require health insurance plans, including those provided by Catholic-affiliated hospitals and universities, to offer free contraceptives for health-related issues and birth control. The lawmakers took action after the committee chair blocked testimony from a female witness who supports the mandate. We’re joined by D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who walked out of the hearing, and the witness who was barred from testifying, Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke. Georgetown is a Catholic university whose health plan does not cover contraception.

Transcript:

JUAN GONZALEZ: In a dramatic scene yesterday on Capitol Hill, several Democrats walked out of a congressional hearing on the Obama administration’s contraception rule. They took action after the committee chair blocked testimony from a female witness who supports the mandate. The rule would require health insurance plans, including those provided by Catholic-affiliated hospitals and universities, to offer free birth control methods.

Before walking out, Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York criticized the panel at the hearing, which was exclusively male.

REP. CAROLYN MALONEY: What I want to know is: where are the women? When I look at this panel, I don’t see one single woman representing the tens of millions of women across the country who want and need insurance coverage for basic preventive healthcare ...

The president did something agile and wise the other day. And something quite important to the health of our politics. He reached up and snuffed out what some folks wanted to make into a cosmic battle between good and evil. No, said the president, we're not going to turn the argument over contraception into Armageddon, this is an honest difference between Americans, and I'll not see it escalated into a holy war. So instead of the government requiring Catholic hospitals and other faith-based institutions to provide employees with health coverage involving contraceptives, the insurance companies will offer that coverage, and offer it free.

The Catholic bishops had cast the president's intended policy as an infringement on their religious freedom; they hold birth control to be a mortal sin, and were incensed that the government might coerce them to treat it otherwise. The president in effect said: No quarrel there; no one's going to force you to violate your doctrine. But Catholics are also Americans, and if an individual Catholic worker wants coverage, she should have access to it - just like any other American citizen. Under the new plan, she will. She can go directly to the insurer, and the religious institution is off the hook.

When the president ...

This morning, Democrats tore into House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) for preventing women from testifying before a hearing examining the Obama administration’s new regulation requiring employers and insurers to provide contraception coverage to their employees. Republicans oppose the administration’s rule and have sponsored legislation that would allow employers to limit the availability of birth control to women.

Ranking committee member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) had asked Issa to include a female witness at the hearing, but the Chairman refused, arguing that “As the hearing is not about reproductive rights and contraception but instead about the Administration’s actions as they relate to freedom of religion and conscience, he believes that Ms. Fluke is not an appropriate witness.”

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What is most striking about the showdown over contraceptive freedom is not the political victory that President Obama earned by standing up for women's reproductive rights, although his Republican adversaries are certainly helping him to make the most of it. Those adversaries don't seem to realize they have fallen into a trap, whether the White House set them up intentionally or not.

While the Catholic bishops and their allies on the religious right insist that this is an argument over the First Amendment, their true, longstanding purpose now stands revealed to the public. They would begin by imposing their dogma on every woman unlucky enough to work for an employer who shares it — an agenda that is deeply unpopular even among the Catholic faithful, let alone the rest of the American electorate. Then they would impose it on everyone, as the theorists of the religious right suggest every time they deny the separation of church and state.

The bishops have nothing to lose except their flock, whose respect for the hierarchy has plunged anyway over its resistance to reform and its failure to punish abuses far graver and more sinful than contraception. If they had to stand for election, not many of them would be left standing. And if they had to face a referendum on this current matter, they would lose resoundingly to the president, according to the latest survey data.

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Politicized culture wars are debilitating because they almost always require partisans to denigrate the moral legitimacy of their opponents, and sometimes to deny their very humanity. It’s often not enough to defeat a foe. Satisfaction only comes from an adversary’s humiliation.

One other thing about culture wars: One side typically has absolutely no understanding of what the other is trying to say.

That is why the battle over whether religious institutions should be required to cover contraception under the new health-care law was so painful — and why it was so hard to comprehend why President Obama, who has been a critic of culture wars for so long, did not try to defuse this explosive question from the beginning.

It’s also why he was right, finally, to reach a compromise that respected the legitimate concerns of each side. He should have done this at the outset, but far better late than never.

That so many liberal Catholics supported the