If there’s anyone who should avoid criticisms of contraception, it’s Rush Limbaugh. But he apparently just can’t help himself. My MSNBC colleague Morgan Whitaker reported:
The conservative radio host took on a handful of ads created by Colorado Consumer Health Initiative and ProgressNow Colorado Education, which tout the benefits of the health reform law. Limbaugh’s ire was focused on a particularly controversial ad that plays up the law’s free birth control with an image of a young woman who appears excited to get “between the covers” with a young man.“What these ads are really promising, if you like your risky promiscuous lifestyle, you can keep it. That’s what Obama’s promising,” Limbaugh said. “If you like being promiscuous, you can keep on being promiscuous. If you like being a prostitute, then have at it.”
You see, from Limbaugh’s perspective, Americans concerned with contraception access, practically by definition, “like being promiscuous” and “like being a prostitute.”
The idea that consumers may want birth control as part of a basic approach to modern health care simply doesn’t cross his mind. Millions of Americans — many of them married, many of them with children — rely on birth control, not because they’re promiscuous or hookers, but because it meets their health care needs.
That said, as we discussed on Tuesday, Limbaugh’s remarks reinforce the fact that the right is increasingly bold in its opposition to, and complaints about, contraception access.
As for the radio host’s background, it was just last year when Limbaugh targeted Sandra Fluke over contraception access, arguing on his program, “Ms. Fluke, have you ever heard of not having sex? Have you ever heard of not having sex so often? The women in her law school program are having so much sex, they are going broke buying birth control pills.”
As Rachel noted at the time, “[A]pparently nobody ever explained to him how birth control works…. It’s like he thinks each time you want to have sex, you have to go to a birth control vending machine and buy a new pill for that sexual experience or something…. More sex does not mean more birth control pills.”
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."