For those of us who may have even the slightest inclination to give anti-abortion activists the benefit of the doubt, the time may have come to shed our last feeling of sympathy.

The Bush White House, in another spectacular display of ideology over science, is proposing a regulation that would deny federal funding to any medical facility that does not allow pharmacists to refuse to hand out Plan B, IUDs and even Birth Control pills for religious reasons. In classic right-wing strawman semantics, this is framed as a matter of "religious freedom" vs. patients' rights.

This alone, I expect, should not be too surprising. We have always been familiar with the Right's ongoing desire to overturn Roe v. Wade. But a deeper look reveals a new ideological battle front altogether: contraception. The Dominionist Right is now beginning to frame contraception as equivalent to abortion.

We would do well to remember that those who style themselves as "pro-life" are not simply anti-abortion. They are against modern sexuality and female sexual independence in their entirety. That the Dominionists are increasingly unveiling their radical agenda may be both a blessing and a curse. A short-term curse that hurts families with draconian punishments, but perhaps a useful opportunity that can help us begin to reverse the damage caused by this utterly wicked, perverse and backwards movement.