One of the most persistent canards the Obama campaign got away with was that Republicans wanted to “end access to birth control.” What Republicans were opposing wasn’t “whether or not you can have contraception,” as one Democratic Congresswoman put it, but whether or not your boss should be required to pay for your birth control.

I tried to refrain from using the “lie” word against the Democrats saying these things and the journalists repeating them as if they were true, because I think the liberal mindset sometimes doesn’t differentiate between state action and non-state action. If your boss says you need to pay for your own birth control, that may actually seem to some liberals as equivalent to the government banning birth control, somehow. Some liberals think that unless something is mandatory, it’s as good as prohibited.