Christine M. Flowers: The 'war on women' is all rumor

TO HEAR some people, there's a "war against women," and one of the key skirmishes is being waged south of the Mason-Dixon (a/k/a bikini) line. Funny thing is, I really don't feel under siege, and neither do a lot of my friends. In fact, the only people we see coming up over the hill with their rifles are other women, who apparently regard any attempt to limit their reproductive rights as an attack on Fort Dump-on-her.

It's really quite interesting how a battle over fiscal responsibility, the commerce clause and religious freedom quickly morphed into a referendum on whether health insurance should cover birth control for law-school students.

Let's take a historical trip back to the origins of the crisis, shall we? (Cue the Ken Burns soundtrack and the Matthew Brady photos.)

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as "Obamacare" for those who don't "care" for "Obama," includes a mandate that forces health insurers to cover certain forms of preventative care. Given the fact that we're all about health here, you'd think that the thing we're aiming to prevent is illness. And you would be right, as long as you consider pregnancy a disease. If you don't (and that includes people who think that babies are miracles, not malignancies), you have a problem with forcing insurers to cover birth control.

And if you also happen to be part of a religion that regards birth control as immoral (whether you yourself agree with that principle,) you should be repulsed by the thought that the government can force employers affiliated with your church to violate their First Amendment rights.

At the beginning, when the birth-control debate was still young, rational observers were able to separate their personal beliefs and preferences from their fundamental sense of fairness. It wasn't a political hot potato, at least not for those who cared as much about civil liberties as they do about women's health. Since 1965, women have had the right to use birth control, just not the right to have it paid for by governmental fiat. Similarly, Catholics couldn't prevent women from using the Pill (not even Catholic women, who are 98 percent in the tank), but we weren't going to be coerced into subsidizing what our church considers a sin.

Everyone was able to live with that.

But, then, Sandra Fluke came on the scene and, aided and abetted by the type of woman who calls mandatory ultrasounds "rape," the Georgetown law student transformed an economic, constitutional and religious debate into the Battle of She-loh.

I have to admit how impressed I am by the Amazon warriors. A certain type of woman with a certain type of agenda has managed to hoodwink much of the nation into believing that conservatives in general and the GOP in particular want to keep them barefoot and pregnant (because everyone knows that there's a direct correlation between having a baby and losing your credit line at Payless).

It's clever, really, the way people like Hillary Clinton have been able to make a connection between the Taliban and the Tea Party, eliciting gales of applause from an audience predisposed to confusing the two.

At a recent event, the secretary of state made the following hard-to-misinterpret comment about "extremists": "It doesn't matter what country they're in or what religion they claim - they all want to control women. They want to control how we dress; they want to control how we act; they even want to control the decisions we make about our health and our own bodies. Yes, it is hard to believe, but even here at home, we have to stand up for women's rights." To which I, as a woman who has actually dealt with women fleeing oppressive regimes, say: Shame on you, Madam Secretary.

Shame on you for comparing the Catholic church and its legitimate attempt to protect fundamental religious freedoms to Islamic purists who stone adulterers.

Shame on you for seeing no difference between a policy dispute that will land before the Supreme Court (the individual mandate) and gender discrimination under Sharia. Shame on you for making false equivalencies between your conservative countrymen and Islamic terrorists. Obviously, Mrs. Clinton, the only way you can perpetuate the myth of this "war on women" is through hyperbole, or outright lies.

Unfortunately for the secretary of state, the facts don't lie. According to a recent Washington Post poll, President Obama's approval rating actually slipped among women since the contraception battle began. In February, 53 percent of women approved, and 44 percent disapproved. In March, his positives slipped to 50 percent. Hardly a catastrophic plunge, true. But it does show that not every woman is buying into this "war" narrative and that we don't need Obama's benevolent protection from our so-called enemies on the right.

Some of us think that we already live in a country that respects our intelligence, our autonomy and our moral certitude.

The rumor of war is greatly exaggerated.