Mark Greene has a message for Rush Limbaugh and the men who are beating up on women over birth control: You are cowards.

We are looking at a turning point in the career of Rush Limbaugh. I know its been said before, but his latest tirade against women who are asking for access to birth control in their health plans is stoking a backlash against women that is vastly more hypocritical than any of his previous forays into the toxic realm of wedge-issue politics.

The man has outdone himself. And I think I know why.

The likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other commenters of their stripe used to have the divisive, binary world of extra crazy single-issue politics to themselves. (I won’t label these guys as right wing because the right/left political divide is just more binary labels designed to set Americans against each other.) But regardless of how you label these guys, things have changed. The GOP Presidential field has raised the anti-government, anti-immigrant, pro-birther, election-by-paranoid-wedge-issue ante so high that folks like Rush Limbaugh need to push even further into crazy land just to be heard above the general din of hyper-religious, hyper-reactionary political rhetoric that has taken over the Republican Presidential primary.

But Rush really did shit the bed this time. Why? Because he has made the point several times that Americans should not have to pay for birth control for “sluts”. Did I get that right? I think I got that right.

But let’s let Rush speak for himself. In the following quote, Limbaugh responds to testimony by Sandra Fluke before an unofficial Congressional panel. Fluke was talking about the challenges of paying for contraception at a Jesuit University which will not provide it as part of student health plans.

“What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.” Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free

First, I will quickly note that Sandra Fluke gets health insurance because she is a student at the university and has opted for that coverage. She is not asking for people to “buy her birth control”. She is asking that it be part of her health plan. A reasonable request.

But forget that. That’s like, a sane argument in an insane world and I’m not gonna get bogged down in talking logic to the crazy squad. I have seen more INSANE posts on the net this week by men who are “not going to pay for sluts to have sex”. These rants are everywhere. And what I note more than anything else about these posts is the rage. I mean these comments boil over with rage; rage that is way out of scale with the issue of birth control. Rage by men against women.

And let me take a moment to say something very clearly here. You guys who are saying this stuff? You are not men at all. You’re cowards. Because real men don’t beat up on women. Ever. You can share your opinions if you like in a civil and gentlemanly way, but this stuff you’re doing is disgusting.

As for Rush destroying his career, he’s unleashed a firestorm of woman haters. And he’s unleashed it on the issue of sexual intercourse between unmarried men and women. And ten thousand raging nut jobs are out there are now insulting every woman on the net.

And this is my favorite part: Its all being linked to the Republican Party. Why? Because the GOP refused to allow Fluke to speak before their house committee on contraception and religious liberty. A panel that created yet another twitter firestorm when the folks who were allowed to address the issue of contraception before this Republican controlled committee turned out to be all men. The photo of those five schmucks circulated ten billion times. And women love that “men telling them what to do with their bodies thing”. They just love it.

So here’s Rush and that big bed of his that he has so thoroughly shat. The problem Rush has unleashed is two fold. One, is the INSANE level of hypocrisy that is landing right at his front door. Rush says women who are requesting birth control as part of their health coverage are sluts. And this begs a very clear and simple question. Has Rush Limbaugh ever had sex out of wedlock? Ever? Did he ever fumble with some girl’s bra strap in the back of his dad’s Ford? Did he ever find his way into some women’s bed in college? Did he ever engage in sexual intercourse with any one of his four wives BEFORE he entered into the blissful state of holy matrimony? It is four, right?

And two, Rush has managed to crystalize the horror of a Republican world for every woman in America. The issue of abortion rights has always been a darker more ambivalent issue for many women. But birth control? These guys want to take away birth control? And thanks to Rush we can see the agenda for what it is. We can see the ugly anti-women mindset that lurks behind the “religious freedom” argument. It ain’t about religious freedom, it’s about sluts, whores and prostitutes.

And having birthed this refreshingly honest display of his ilk’s true attitude toward women, Rush is going to get what’s coming to him. The media elites are going to do their cold cynical math on this one. They’re going to calculate the damage control, look at the numbers and they’re going to cut bait on Rush Limbaugh. Because he just lost them the 2012 Presidential and Congressional elections.

And here’s an added note on the cost of providing “universal free birth control” via private or public insurers.

Maggie Mahar writes the following over at Time.com:

“if an insurer makes birth control totally free for all of its customers, it avoids having to reimburse them for countless unplanned pregnancies and births. Overall, then, it’s cheaper for the insurer to pay a little upfront to save a ton down the line.”

Read the article here.

So good luck Rush, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out to fuck-all-nowhere. Cause it wasn’t nice knowing you. Not at all.

For more on Rush Limbaugh’s sexist tirades, read Matt Crowder’s “A Dad Defends Danica Patrick“

For more on Politics and Birth Control, read Lauren Hale’s “How Did We Get to Where We Are in the Political Birth Control Debate? A Short History.”

Photo: AP/Brian Jones