Social Issues Will Defeat the GOP

The controversy over birth control being part of the federal health insurance program is not going to disappear. It will be fed by the Obama team and the media and will make all Republican candidates look like they oppose women's rights and want to keep women "barefoot and pregnant." Of course, that is a gross over-simplification of the issue but modern media has a way of reducing politics to its absurd possibilities.
To be clear : the issue is whether the federal government can order church-funded entities to offer birth control to their employees through the church-sponsored employee health care insurance program. Conservatives say this violates the first amendment right of religious groups to freely practice their faith without government interference. President Obama and the Democrat Party say that the issue is a health issue and has nothing to do with first amendment religious freedom rights.
Read that paragraph several times and you will see, I think, that there will never be closure on the issue. The two sides are so dug-in to their positions historically that they will never see the other side's arguments, and neither side will throw in the towel and let the other side win.
That is the essence of religious and faith-related issues. They are tenets often (as is the Catholic Church's thousand year old belief that birth control should not be practiced except through abstinence) so strongly believed and followed that no one will change. Nor should they. Religious beliefs are off-limits under the Constitution, unless the beliefs cause serious societal harm or seriously harm the members themselves.
No Democrat or Republican would want to argue with this. But, they seem unable to see that the birth control issue is exactly that - a religious belief for or against birth control - that nobody will be able to change.
And, that is why the federal government, and all other governmental entities, should stay out of the business of forcing birth control onto religious groups that oppose it.
President Obama is on the right track when he says that the federal government will arrange to have health insurance providers offer birth control to those who would not be covered because an employer which is a religious entity will not pay for the coverage. But, he does not go far enough. If he is determined to make birth control freely available under Obamacare, he needs to set up an insurance "pool" much like the pools in states for otherwise non-insured drivers, that would provide birth contorl coverage to employees not otherwise covered. The pool concept would work and it would prevent the religious entity employer from paying through the back door by having its own insurer provide coverage.
If the GOP does not see the merits of this approach, I fear that the Obama
team will use the birth control issue to pull the vast majority of woman voters to his side in November. This would make a GOP victory almost impossible.
My advice to Mssrs Romney, Santorum, et al, would be - come to your senses, get religion out of politics because it doesn't belong there, and find a way to keep women on your side. Otherwise, you are going to lose, bigtime, in November.