"What are conservatives trying to conserve"?

[Riot]

The Hyde Amendment has made it illegal for federal funds to fund abortion for the past 30 years. Zero federal funds are used for abortion.

Republicans can rest assured that no federal funds ever have been, or are used, for abortion.

In spite of that, the facts are that Republicans in Congress and state governments have indeed waged an aggressive and newly renewed war on women's rights over the past two years, even trying to make birth control illegal. Let alone the multiple bills that have been passed this past year legalizing the government requiring object rape of women via vaginal ultrasound penetration, not only against the woman and doctors objection, but requiring the woman to pay for it.

That is nothing other than massive, unprecedented government interference of the individual rights of citizens of this country.

Birth control prevents abortions. A perfect example of a ridiculous war on women with the same Republican party presenting strangely opposing ideas: not only do they want to outlaw abortion that is now legal, but they want to outlaw the birth control that prevents abortions.

The numbers prove an unprecedented current attack on women, and their currently legal rights. To pretend otherwise is absurd. If one is a woman, this is no "sideshow of distraction". It is the reality of trying to keep women home and pregnant.

It is true that demographic changes affect this struggle. But demographic changes did not cause the struggle, nor do they lie at its roots. It is also true, I think, that the views represented by the likes of Rick Santorum are fading, and that his screams against the changes he cannot prevent are like a death rattle.

That doesn't mean they can't do damage, doesn't mean they can't temporarily prevail. But they know their time is passing and that the next generation will not react with shock to the changes that shock Santorum, because they will not experience them as changes, because they will have gotten used to them, because they grew up with them.

There may be as many young women, including Catholic women, as ever who regard themselves as conservative. But nearly all of them use birth control, before as well as during marriage. Gays will be accepted, just as a stroll through the schools of rural Georgia or the streets of Jackson, Miss. today does not reveal what went on there in 1963.

Problems will not end, the competition among values will not end, but the vision of life that Rick Santorum clings to will end, or diminish to a point where it is not politically viable.

Chait is right that the Republican right wing knows this; he is right that they see this as their last shot (it may not be; I wouldn't celebrate victory quite yet); he is right that they are responding with a strategy that will probably end in hastening their political demise (having cultivated that fundamentalist reaction for decades, the Republican Party has backed itself into a corner); and he is right that demographics is affecting the outcome, and will do so over the next decade. But to understand what is happening politically, I think one has to understand that this is about more than demographics: it is about fundamental social change and the reaction to it.

And the fundamental changes at stake and at issue are mostly about rights, the rights won by submerged and subordinate groups roughly between 1954 and 1973, and the privileges and powers lost or limited, or perceived to be lost, by those who benefited, however unjustly, from the subordination of others.