Guileless, let's be clear on two things.
1. I'm not claiming that there are many non-Catholics saying that contraception is in itself sinful. I have been saying that the standard conservative Protestant position on contraception has become substantially more nuanced in recent years, especially concerning the provision of contraception by subsidy or charity. I've also said that many Protestants have decided, contra the evidence, that several forms of contraception are sinful because they cause abortions. I've been interested in the reasons for these changes.
2. I understand the arguments offered against the employer mandate. They are philosophically and legally bankrupt (and often just factually incorrect) and I've moved on to psychologizing them. Nothing I've said so far has been intended as an argument against the position of the Catholic bishops, and that debate probably isn't appropriate to this thread right now, unless lots of others are interested. I have been making claims about the reasons why non-Catholics in the religious right (say they) find these arguments convincing. This is a little surprising because one wouldn't really have expected such a backlash to the policy in the abstract.
Moving on, are you claiming that Limbaugh's position wasn't a fairly popular one among religious conservatives? The intersection of the position with the general "makers vs takers" message of the Romney campaign and the intersection of religious conservatives with Romney's voters makes that hard to believe. I certainly read and heard a lot of defenses of Limbaugh, even if "it's not the language [Romney] would have used".
Some background:
There is some disagreement within the pro-life community as to whether or not hormonal birth control can cause what they consider to be an abortion. Outside of it, there is very little reason to think that this could be the case, and every reason to think that the effect, if it exists, is tiny. This is not the impression one gets from much pro-life material, to say the least. Also, google "abortion-pill mandate". There is no evidence that the pills they're talking about and which are covered by the employer mandate can cause an abortion, even using pro-lifers' preferred definition of the word.
Finally, to this:
I'm not saying that the outrage over the employer mandate in particular was self-perpetuating, although surely it was to some extent. My claim has been that outrage from the religious right is self-perpetuating from event to event. It was initially outraged over the government telling religious universities they couldn't discriminate. This was of course a policy that the government had never done before, and a host of religious leaders and judicial scholars objected. Etc. Then that became a little too obviously racist, and they at least claimed that they didn't even want to racially discriminate anyway, so they moved on to abortion. School prayer was also in there somewhere, and the War on Christmas probably counts. Now we have the "abortion-pill mandate". I'm saying that this is basically all political opportunism at the top; the rank and file on the religious right would not have objected to these things much at all, excepting perhaps the first one, without the opportunists at the top picking targets for them. I also think that a lot of what's determined those targets is the degree to which they brought conservative Protestants into line with Catholics, creating a larger political bloc.
I don't think I'm missing the point of the disagreements. I think that the disagreements themselves are basically all about false consciousness. I'm willing to make an exception for the fight over gay rights. That's probably just some pretty deep-seated bigotry.
