“This doesn’t mean that it should be a political litmus test, it doesn’t mean that they have to be Democrat or Republican, but there should be a litmus test that they be pro-women. Our votes have to include that requirement at least. And it should be a litmus test that applies to male candidates as well.”

So said Sandra Fluke, at a Women’s History Month celebration hosted by Rep. Elanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) at the Rayburn Building yesterday afternoon. She was an honored guest, alongside DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fl).

The attending Democratic lawmakers are members of a party chaired by a woman, the national committee of which five of the nine officers are women, and whose ranking House member is also a woman. Presumably they would all pass Fluke’s litmus test. It’s moments like this one that lay bare the left’s “War on Women” narrative as an electoral strategy. If they really took access to affordable contraception seriously, then why Sandra Fluke’s conspicuous silence regarding making them available over the counter?

The truth is she wasn’t brought on board to air sensible compromises, she made that clear with her wildly inflated statement that birth control could cost up to $1000 a year. Fluke was a co-president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice at Georgetown, where she waged a three-year campaign challenging the college’s right to not subsidize something their religion deems to be murder and authored a journal article defending the government’s responsibility to pay for gender reassignment surgery. Moreover, her boyfriend’s father has given tens of thousands of dollars in donations to Democratic candidates and she is now represented by the PR firm of former White House Communications Director and MSNBC contributor, avowed Mao Zedong fan Anita Dunn.

Despite the impression one might get from Rick Santorum’s moralistic and politically suicidal obsession with birth control, the fight over a contraceptive mandate might not be a losing issue for Republicans. Obama’s approval rating has tanked in the last couple of weeks while the stupid Manichean showdown between Fluke & Rush was on heavy rotation, and it’s been widely noted that even though a large number of Catholics use birth control, they object to the government forcing its will upon the church.

The birth control restrictionist faction of which Santorum is a part is probably too strong for any of the over-the-counter talk to get serious traction in the GOP. On the other side PhRMA in nanny-state clothing will stifle any cries to remove contraceptives from the government requisitioning scheme that is mandated healthcare. Fluke’s litmus test does nothing to upset that balance of power.

Michelle Fields of TheDC has the poster child for subsidized contraceptives’ immoderate words on video here (the embed wasn’t working for some reason). Be sure to catch the part at the end where she talks about her fanmail telling her to run for office, and flatters them by saying, “maaaybe someday I will.”