March 5, 2012 8:06AM # The ‘War on Women’ — a Rhetorical Distraction By [Roger Pilon](https://www.cato.org/people/roger-pilon) --- SHARE Today [POLITICO Arena](http://www.politico.com/arena/) asks: > Now that Rush Limbaugh has apologized, will voters see the Democrats’ “war on women” language as overkill? My response: We’re in the season of rhetorical overkill. Rush Limbaugh’s vile attack last week on Sandra Fluke was reprehensible. So too is the Democratic campaign to paint a Republican “war on women” — not least because it treats women as a monolithic class, ignoring the many women who grasp what’s at issue here — liberty. ObamaCare is a major step toward socialized health care. You can pretend otherwise — the “war on women” rhetoric aims at that — but the coercive elements inherent in any socialized scheme come to the surface when conflicts like the one before us arise. And[ it’s only the beginning](https://www.cato.org/its-not-about-contraceptives-not-really/). Soon enough, as costs to “the public” mount (the only costs that matter in socialized arrangements), Republicans will be talking about a “war on the elderly,” and they’ll be right. After all, “We’re all in this together.” We have that on high authority. Welcome to the world of all against all. ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Health Care](https://www.cato.org/health-care), [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).