To whom, then, are these Republicans talking? Apparently not to women, whom they treat not as equals but as totemic and unknowable. Which is to say, they don’t “get” women. As such, they risk losing not only independents and moderates, whose votes they desperately need come November. They also risk losing their own women, who want very much to cast a ballot for smaller government, reduced deficits, and a confident, job-producing business environment, but don’t want to belong to a club that seems aggressively hostile to women and whose members can’t keep their mouths shut about issues that only reinforce the notion the Republicans are intolerant and rigid…

It is noteworthy that so many Republican men are focused on women’s reproduction and issues of the hearth, while veteran Republican women leaders are riveted on the economy and jobs. Could it be that the liberal goal of reversing sex roles finally is manifesting, most vividly within the party least likely to have advanced the cause of evolution? If only men could get pregnant, then we’d really have a rollicking debate. If only …

Meanwhile, Romney had better speak often and with conviction about his own disagreement with some of his party’s platform, or the anti-woman narrative will become so entrenched that the 2012 GOP may go down in history as having sacrificed the nation’s economy to protect the rights of human embryos. He will have to speak loudly, too, if he is to be heard over the iconic women the Democratic Party has assembled for its own convention stage—from the famous Ms. Fluke to the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL. The 2012 election seems to have devolved from a debate between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes to “The Clash of the Embryos.” Perhaps the math is just too hard for either party.

How tragically ironic that the party of small government and individual liberty may have orchestrated its own defeat by insisting on some of the most invasive state policies in the history of man. Perhaps it is time for a new kind of history.