I hate to break it to Peggy Noonan, if there's anyone out there who's taking an "extremist" position, it's the Catholic bishops and those on the right like herself, who are in disagreement with the 98 percent of Catholic women who have used contraception at some point in their lives.

Noonan joins the list of recent lackeys for the Catholic bishops, who are not only out of touch with their own female church members but with the American public in general. She does her best to conflate support for contraceptive services with being in support of abortion, and paints this as some black and white issue with only two sides which don't exist. I guess it's too much for her to grasp that if you don't want women to have abortions, then the first thing you should be supporting is for them to have access to contraception.

As always, what this really comes down to is sex and wanting to make people ashamed for having it. Conservatives can pretend this is about morality or abortion, but it always comes back to them wanting to control people's sex lives. And as far as these Catholic bishops go, when they stop protecting child molesters among their ranks and give women some equal standing in their church hierarchy instead of being second class citizens, maybe they'll have a leg to stand on to tell someone else what they're doing is immoral.

And if Republicans think running on a campaign of not paying for women's birth control is a winner this upcoming election as the Villagers in the corporate media keep trying to tell us it is, bring it on. They're going to see a backlash from this where they don't know what hit them once enough women start to realize they want to move backwards on covering contraception in the year 2012. Peggy Noonan is going to find out those so-called "leftists" in the Democratic base are actually right in the middle of where the rest of the country is at when it comes to the availability and affordability of contraceptives.

Transcript below the fold.