The Bishops And The GOP

Are the Catholic bishops and the Republican Party in some kind of mutual suicide pact?  The bishops have doubled down on birth control, and new polls are showing Rick Santorum pulling into the lead over Romney.  Here's Andrew Sullivan on Santorum:

He is easily the politician most hostile to individual liberty on the right. He believes states have every right to ban contraception, all abortion, and any legal protections for gay couples. He disavows any secular, Enlightenent view of America's founding. For him, freedom only counts if you adhere to the current fundamentalist rigidity of the Benedict XVI church. I've cited this before, but here he is on freedom:

This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

Notice he explicitly cites the bedroom as the place where big government can intervene. If you are not reproducing as the Vatican demands, legal penalties are in principle possible. There is no public-private distinction. His mentor, Robbie George, takes the view that in principle, the state also has the right to penalize masturbation with criminal penalties, a position flushed out of him in the Prop 2 trial in Colorado. The only reason the two would not actively prosecute gay couples for having sex or straight couples for using condoms is for prudential reasons: it's not practical. But in theory, they'd have the Catholic church's most reactionary elements dictating your freedoms.

The bishops are not very popular amongst the Catholic laity.  The terrible handling of child sex abuse, along with a rigid theology which doesn't mesh with the majority of lay Catholics gives them little latitude for a tremendously unpopular policy fight.  What I have seen locally are smaller collections and fewer folks in the pews in recent years, which doesn't bode well for the long-term health of the Church given the tremendous ill will which will be created with less conservative Catholics in this battle.  The Church starts to look like a subsidiary of the Republican Party in this.

The idea that Republicans will join with the bishops to fight this unpopular fight makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for a political party in a two-party system.  Republicans would drive women and independents to Obama in droves.  There is no upside for Republicans.  All the folks who are going to side with the bishops were already going to vote for the GOP.  I'm just stunned that they would be this foolish.