I can has control of your body, gals

At one point did the notion that denying health benefits to women would be a winning political strategy for the Republican party?

Let’s take a look at Thursday, February 16, 2012, the day Washington fell into a time-warp.

• On Capitol Hill, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) held hearings on contraception and religious freedom that produced the now-famous picture of a table full of men called to weigh in on access to contraceptives. Democrats wanted a woman — a Georgetown law student with a friend who lost an ovary because the university doesn’t cover birth control — to say her piece at the hearing, but Issa wouldn’t let her on the panel. He said she wasn’t “appropriate or qualified” to discuss the topic at hand.
Jaws dropped in the women’s rights community.

“She didn’t have the right credentials?” NOW President Terry O’Neill scoffed. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘Buddy, you and your little panel over there don’t have the right anatomy to talk about birth control.’”
• Politico published a story about a right wing firestorm that had been burning for days: Did the young women who attended this year’s CPAC wear skirts that were too short?

[...]

• Foster Friess, the billionaire backer of Rick Santorum’s campaign, became an instant celebrity when he went on Andrea Mitchell’s MSNBC show and said, “Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”

 Then there's the state legislature in Virginia who just passed a law legalizing rape against women who want to have an abortion.

Dahlia Lithwick puts paid to the new Virginia law that requires women seeking to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion to have a probe stuck up in them so that they will be shamed like the sluts they are before God and the various meddling members of the House Of Delegates who believe that a woman's place is in all those movies they watch for five minutres (or less) in their hotel rooms at the annual god-botherer's convention in Atlantic City. Anyway, Lithwick comes up with a real gem amid the muck:

Virginia Democrat Del. David Englin, who opposes the bill, has said Gilbert's statement "is in line with previous Republican comments on the issue," recalling one conversation with a GOP lawmaker who told him that women had already made the decision to be "vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant." (I confirmed with Englin that this quote was accurate.)

Yes, and anyone who has had their earlobes pierced already has made the decision that, one day, the law would require them to have a tenpenny nail driven into their eye.

 Like, I said, I don't know when they decided that this would be a winning political argument, but I encourage their war on sex and naughty parts.