One Fox News host on Monday asserted that Democrats had concocted the “phony” Republican war on women to divert attention from high gas prices and a slow economic recovery.

Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy noted that gas prices on Catalina Island in California were around $7 a gallon and President Barack Obama could not use the economy as campaign issue.

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“You know, the stimulus didn’t work out so well and he’s got a lot of problems,” Doocy explained. “So in the last couple of months what they have done, the Democrats, is that they have invented this phony war on women. They said Republicans are against women.”

“There’s not really a war on women. There’s a war for women because they would like to have as many women vote for their candidate,” he added.

During a Sunday interview on CNN, host Candy Crowley asked Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) if it was unfair to call GOP policies a “war on women.”

“The policies that have come out of the Republican Party, saying that we should have a debate again over contraception and whether we should have access to it and it should be affordable, saying that — like Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin, you know, he tried to quietly repeal the Equal Pay Act,” Wasserman Schultz noted. “Women aren’t going to stand for that. Governor Walker just signed a bill that repeals the equal pay law they had in Wisconsin for years.”

She continued: “You have Republicans who have engaged themselves for the entire Congress trying to redefine rape as only being forcible rape, defunding Planned Parenthood and family planning programs. The Lilly Ledbetter Act — the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act put teeth behind the notion that women deserve equal pay for equal work. That was the first bill the President Obama signed into law. The overwhelming majority of Republicans serving in Congress voted against it.”

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“So, the focus of the Republican Party on turning back the clock for women really is something that is unacceptable and shows how callous and insensitive they are towards women’s priorities.”

But Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) told Crowley that Democrats were wrong to accuse Republicans of waging a war on women.

“We’ve got to quit exaggerating our political differences,” Cleaver said, adding that it was also wrong for Republicans to accuse Democrats of a “war on religion.”

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A USA Today/Gallup survey of 12 of the top battleground states recently found that likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had lost 14 points among women in the months after he and many other Republicans objected to mandating that contraception be covered by the health insurance offered by religious institutions. Six in 10 voters favored Obama, while only 30 percent supported Romney.

Watch the video below from Fox News’ Fox & Friends, broadcast on April 9, 2012.

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(H/T: Media Matters)