"WHY ARE WE FIGHTING A GENDER-BASED CULTURE WAR?" ASKED THE AUTHOR OF SAVE THE MALES

Kathleen Parker finds it unseemly that we're talking about ladyparts in this presidential election:

We should be talking about The Issues, we keep telling ourselves. But in the waning days of the presidential campaign, these are the issues -- binders full of cultural issues that continue to divide us and by which Barack Obama hopes to win reelection.

... the Obama campaign has strategically tried to push the Republican Party and Mitt Romney into a corner by advancing the war-on-women narrative.

... Random comments by a couple of outliers provided wind for Obama's sails. [Todd] Akin's remarks, that women don't get pregnant when "legitimately" raped, was just idiotic and immediately dismissed by Republican Party leadership, including Romney. Yet ... [Richard] Mourdock's argument is not nonsensical. If life begins at conception, then one life is not worth less than another owing to the circumstances of creation.

... [Mitt] Romney's position on the subject is clear. He supports exceptions for rape and incest. He also said early in the primary season: "Contraception, it's working just fine. Just leave it alone."

So why are we still talking about it?

Why are we still taking about it? Oh, I don't know ... Because of the relentless push for laws limiting abortion in states where Republicans triumphed at the polls in 2010? Because a President Romney would get to replace several aging Supreme Court justices, with Roe v. Wade in the balance?

It's particularly rich that Parker is chiding Todd Akin for trying to distinguish "legitimate rape" from other kinds, because she's spent much of her pundit career trying to litigate the definition of rape. Her book, Save the Males -- yes, she's tired of hearing people fight over gender issues, but she wrote a book called Save the Males -- contains a section titled "The Rape of Rape," in which she writes:

In today's hookup culture, there's so much confusion about what constitutes rape that a new term has emerged -- "gray rape" -- to describe that hazy area between consent and denial that often becomes blurred in the heat of the night. Did she mean "no" no? Or did she just mean "maybe" no? Does "stop" mean right this very second? Or could it mean, oh, pleasepleaseplease, just ten more seconds?

This is in keeping with a column she wrote in 1999 about an Oklahoma legislative proposal to define sex as rape when it takes place under circumstances "where the victim is intoxicated by alcohol, a controlled dangerous substance or other intoxicant to such an extent that the victim is incapable of giving legal consent." She opposed this bill, telling us:

As a former college student who once or twice was in the same room with a keg of beer and a bunch of guys, I'm confounded. As a woman who enjoys a little wine now and then and who has, on occasion, enjoyed a candlelight dinner where everyone's intentions were clear, I'm insulted. As a mother of show-stopper sons who are natural-born chick magnets, I'm outraged.

Yes, this was a bad law because her sons were "chick magnets." I'm not making that up.

(The law is on the books. It has apparently not turned Oklahoma into a sexual fascist state.)

Parker has also denounced the attention paid to rape in the military, crowing about the fact that a claim of rape that was later deemed false appeared in a New York Times Magazine story on the subject (as if that delegitimizes other claims of rape and assault), and offering a rather remarkable justification for military sexual violence:

... more overt sexual aggression may be the product of something few will acknowledge, at least on the record: Resentment.

Off the record, in dozens of interviews over a period of years, male soldiers and officers have confided that many men resent women because they've been forced to pretend that women are equals, and men know they're not.

The lie breeds contempt, which leads to a simmering rage that sometimes finds expression in aggression toward those deemed responsible.

Targeting women isn't excusable, obviously. It's also not the women's fault that they've been put in this untenable situation -- exposed both to combat and to the repressed fury of sexually charged young men.

The fault lies with the Pentagon and others who have capitulated to feminist pressures to insert women into combat.

Yes, you read that right: men in the military get so ticked off at having to treat women as equals -- so justifiably ticked off -- that they can't help being sexually violent. It's not their fault -- it's feminism's fault!

These writings are from a few years back. If Parker now wants to stop having these culture-war arguments, the reason is obvious: President Obama and the Democrats are winning them.