“The war on religion is now formally declared.”
Or, pay no attention to the improving economy! 
Here Comes the Culture War!
Posted by David Remnick
Somewhere between the New Hampshire primary in 1992 and the release of “The War Room,” James Carville became the Descartes of modern electoral warfare, as “it’s the economy, stupid” became the cogito ergo sum of political knowingness. Inside the Obama White House, it is a given that foreign-policy successes—from the elimination of Osama bin Laden to the withdrawals from Iraq and (soon) Afghanistan—will matter hardly at all in November. The election, the President and his aides acknowledge, will rest almost entirely on the economy—unemployment figures, the state of foreclosures, debates over bailouts, banks, deficits, taxes, income disparities, and, yes, “class warfare.”
Well, perhaps. In recent weeks, the Republican candidates, cognoscenti, and congressional leadership have all made it increasingly plain that the culture wars have not been relegated to the days of the Reverends Falwell and Robertson. Mitt Romney is tweeting furiously about the Administration’s “attacks on religious liberty.” Speaker John Boehner said on the floor of the House that Obama is forcing Catholic hospitals and charities to “provide services they believe are immoral”—i.e., an “attack on religious freedom.” Rick Santorum called Obama “hostile to people of faith, particularly Christians, and specifically Catholics.” Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote in the Washington Post that “radicalism and maliciousness” has led the Administration to issue an “edict delivered with a sneer.” Gerson concluded, “The war on religion is now formally declared.”
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There is no doubt that the Obama team knows it has stepped into a fearsome riptide, but as Irin Carmon, a consistently intelligent reporter and columnist on feminist issues, writes in Salon, “We should be talking about real women affected by this policy, like the unnamed Georgetown law student with polycystic ovarian syndrome featured in the Times, who lost an ovary after falling prey to the ‘pro-life’ insurance compromises at her institution. Or why the millions of women who get their insurance through a Catholic institution and use birth control should be subject to different rules than their fellow citizens. One Catholic bishop insisted, with no sense of irony whatsoever, that ‘people of faith cannot be made second-class citizens.’ Apparently women are another story.”
The context for the Republican rhetoric about a “war on religion” is broader than the new contraception debate; it ranges from implicit White House support for gay marriage (and the triumphs and near-triumphs registered in New York, California, Washington state, and elsewhere) to the dust-up over the Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast-cancer charity’s decision (now happily revoked) to break its financial ties with Planned Parenthood.
Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum are intent on fanning any ember of cultural anxiety, fear, or resentment that can be found. The more the economy shows signs of life—however slight, however deceptive in many ways—the more the Republicans, and their media champions, are likely to resort to the kind of battles outlined in Bill O’Reilly’s 2006 book, “Culture Warrior,” which posited a country divided between decent, hard-working people of faith and pernicious secular liberals—a small but powerful Soros-funded minority that knows only contempt for “traditional American values” and wants to mold the country into “the image of Western Europe.” (Note how, in the Republican debates, the word “Europe” is made to sound like the embodiment of “Soviet.”)
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