It's Democrats who are putting focus on birth control The beauty of the current birth-control conversation for Democrats is that they not only have public opinion on their side but have cannily managed to make contraception a front-burner election-year campaign issue -- by complaining that Republicans are making it From left, Reverend William E. Lori, Roman Catholic Bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., Reverend Dr. Matthew C. Harrison, President, The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, C. Ben Mitchell, Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy Union University, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Director Straus Center of Torah and Western Thought, Yeshiva University and Craig Mitchell, Associate Professor of Ethics of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, testify on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012, before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing: "Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion & Freedom of Conscience. (Carolyn Kaster - AP) front-burner election-year campaign issue. The answer, in other words, to the many who are wondering why the Republicans would want to ride such a losing pony is: They don't. "No one is making birth control a topic," Rick Santorum's longtime media consultant and friend John Brabender told me. It's not an agenda that anyone's running on. But it's a distortion that works to [the other side's] benefit to imply we're for limiting access to birth control."" The narrative that it's conservatives who won't stop talking about pills, sponges and contraceptive foam is probably set in stone at this point; a story in Tuesday's Washington Post reports that contraception has "suddenly become an obsession of the 2012 presidential campaign. The first two such observers quoted in the piece are leaders of the contraception lobby, whose job is to monetize real and perceived attacks, exactly as their counterparts on the right do: "As Planned Parenthood's president, Cecile Richards, said incredulously on Saturday during a rally in Austin: "Somehow in this country, in 2012, this election might turn on whether women should have access to birth control." " Incredulously, or hopefully? It's Democrats like Richards who keep saying this is what the election will turn on. Which is smart, if you are Cecile Richards, because for any campaign or cause these days, outrage is oxygen. See Komen vs. Planned Parenthood. And if the election does turn on contraception, her team wins. When I looked back at a tape of what Republicans have been saying on the topic, what's striking is how reluctant they are to go there. Yes, even including Santorum's 71-year-old bankroller, Foster Friess, whose assets may until now have buffered him from the news that his jokes need work. When Friess recycled a fragment of an (at least) 50-year-old funny about an aspirin held between the knees being all the birth control a nice girl needs, it was in response to Andrea Mitchell's question about whether he was concerned that Santorum's views on birth control and women in combat roles could hurt his viability as a candidate. His first response was to deflect the question: "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! The aspirin inanity that followed has been successfully cast as his candidate's "agenda," mainly through the efforts of Democratic fundraisers: "We've already accumulated 65,000 signatures on our petition opposing their Aspirin Agenda," Sen. Patty Murray said in a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraising letter Friday. "But I'm too mad to stop at "opposing." It's time we punished the people responsible by taking away their jobs. The DSCC is ready to send the GOP agenda back to the 1950s where it belongs - and send these Republicans packing. Will you click here and give $5 or $10 to help us raise $100,000 by the end of today to fire anti-choice Republicans?"" The result? Big bucks, according to a well-reported piece in the Huffington Post that claimed that for Democratic lawmakers, all the talk about birth control "couldn't have come at a more opportune time, giving them the chance to launch a well-oiled, comprehensive effort to lock in women's votes ahead of the 2012 elections" and raising healthy sums for candidates across the country. It is certainly true that all of the GOP presidential candidates have said they'd cut government funding for Planned Parenthood because of the abortion services it provides. And each of the Republican presidential candidates has vowed to undo every last word of the Affordable Care Act, free contraceptive services and all . But in every interview Santorum has given on the topic of birth control - in 2006, last summer and recently - he always stresses that he supports Title X funding for contraception. He's also said he would strenuously oppose any state effort to ban birth control. And do we really believe that a guy who freely allows that he'd bomb Iran if they didn't let inspectors into nuclear facilities is strategically hiding his true intentions regarding the pill? When Charlie Rose asked Santorum on CBS about what Freiss had said, the candidate repeatedly tried to steer the conversation to the economy and jobs, but Rose wasn't having it, insisting that voters "need to understand how you differ from what this guy said." His response, when he finally agreed to give one? What Friess had said was "a bad joke, a stupid joke," not reflective of his own views. I voted for Title X federal funding of birth control. Because the opposite will be assumed if I don't spell it out, no, I do not happen to share Santorum's views on birth control, which he feels is harmful, leaving women, in particular, vulnerable because it unmoors love from responsibility. For one thing, I don't see how we could ever reduce the abortion rate without contraception, and lots of it. And at the Catholic marriage-preparation class known as Pre-Cana that my husband and I attended in New York 20 years ago, I was the only one of the several dozen brides-to-be in attendance who admitted in a women-only discussion circle where we were urged to disclose our post-wedding contraceptive plans that I would not be following church teaching on that front. Nobody from the office formerly known as the Inquisition popped out to drag me away, but it did set off a lively and, for me, surreal discussion about the likelihood of my salvation under such circumstances - a sorting out that I guess I'd thought would occur only posthumously, and with Saint Peter present. Andrew Sullivan has wondered if maybe President Obama lured conservatives into the current uproar over contraception by originally denying religious exemptions from a health-care mandate requiring employers to provide free contraceptive coverage. If so, those are some moves the president has husbanded a little more carefully than I wish he had over the last three years. But from the White House persepective, things sure are looking up: after some strong initial blowback over what even some liberal allies saw as an incursion on religious liberty, a compromise has soothed friends and cast any still upset about the constitutional implications as single-minded soldiers in the ongoing war against women. And as for the all-male photo op in front of the House Oversight Committee, which Democrats are calling the definiting image of the election year? Nancy Pelosi couldn't have planned it any better herself. Melinda Henneberger is a Post political writer and anchor of "She the People."