Another reason why voting for John McCain isn't "revenge for Hillary"

The company he keeps:

Like lawn ornaments in summer, protesters outside the local abortion clinic are fixtures in many places.

Their presence and message have long been so predictable that, without looking or listening, people believe they understand the point. So you might not notice that the protest taking place outside your local clinic has fundamentally changed.

It is no longer about abortion. Saturday, June 7, is the anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision that granted married people the right to use contraception. To mark the day, anti-abortion groups will take to their normal posts outside clinic entrances not to convince Americans to oppose abortion but rather to stop using contraception.

The national campaign is called "Protest the Pill Day 08'" and it is organized by several leading anti-choice groups including the American Life League and Pharmacists for Life. The groups' Web site is full of unscientific, medically inaccurate information.

Anti-contraception activism has been working its way up the priority list of the anti-choice movement in the U.S. in recent years and Saturday's campaign will be one of the most organized and visible displays of this broadening agenda.

There is not one pro-life organization in the U.S. that supports contraception. In fact, the multi-pronged attack against the right to use contraception is led entirely by anti-abortion groups. Their initiatives include opposing health insurance coverage of contraception; urging pharmacists to deny women's birth control prescriptions; and attempting (with no scientific rationale) to reclassify the birth control pill, and all other hormonal forms of contraception, as abortion methods with the goal of banning them. This represents an important and frightening shift in focus by the anti-abortion movement.

Despite the fact that contraception is the only proven way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and reduce abortion rates, anti-choice groups would forgo these benefits, and even risk dramatically increasing abortion rates, in favor of a larger, more insidious goal: changing Americans' sex lives.

That's the Republican base, folks. That's who McCain is going to have to mollify. And if he has to do it by turning American women into mandated brood mares, he'll do it.