Mike Huckabee made a spectacle of himself and tried to pretend it was all the media's fault; then Sean Hannity turned up defending the stance with sarcasm, and complaining about why "the government" should pay for birth control when it was so cheap at Walmart.
As Amanda Marcotte notes (and I have seen this repeated endlessly at a certain Tea Party lite blog in Australia), the claim that it is all about the government paying for it is simply not true:
Hannity's boo-boo here was the result of a larger lie, perpetuated by Mike Huckabee and the folks at Fox News and other right wing media outlets: That the contraception mandate is about the "government" or "Uncle Sugar" buying women's birth control. In reality, the contraception mandate is closer to a consumer protection law. It's really part of a larger program in the Affordable Care Act to set minimum standards about what your insurance plan must cover. It's really no different than a law requiring a car to have four wheels and two headlights to be considered a street legal vehicle. It's telling that Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, Bill O'Reilly, and company feel the need to simply lie about this and claim that there's some kind of taxpayer program directly providing free birth control to women (ironically, they largely ignore actual, long-standing, politically popular programs that do this), because objecting to the real program—women buy insurance, that insurance covers contraception—sounds an awful lot like you are unduly obsessed with what other people get up to in bed.A similar contraceptive mandate had been in place in many States for years; often being brought in under Republican leadership.
It is a sign of their appalling lack of political common sense that the Republicans now want to make to make it a big issue.
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