-- North Carolina Republican state legislator Bob Steinburg, who apparently has company.

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Despite all of the important, progressive strides the Obama administration has taken on contraception access, it's still making one disappointing mistake.

U.S. Department of Justice officials have filed notice that they will appeal a federal judge's order requiring the Food and Drug Administration to make the so-called "morning after" pill available without a prescription to all women without age or certain sales restrictions.

The department also has asked the federal district court to stay its order, which was set to take effect on May 6, according to Allison Price, a spokeswoman.

Let's back up to consider the larger series of events. In December 2011, the administration overruled the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and said morning-after pill would not be available over the counter to anyone under the age of 17. The motivations behind the move appeared entirely political -- the administration clearly hoped to avoid a culture-war fight on minors and contraception less than a year before the presidential election.

A month ago, a federal court forcefully rejected the administration's position, calling it "arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable." The court ruling added that the 2011 policy was "politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent."

For progressives, who endorse the Obama administration's line on reproductive rights and contraception access 9 times out of 10, the hope was that officials would simply accept the ruling, announce that there would be no appeal, and undo what was done a year and a half ago.

Late yesterday, the administration did the opposite, disappointing its allies and appealing last month's ruling. There is, however, a catch.

Actually, there's two. The first is, officials aren't making much of an effort to publicly dispute the merits of the district court's ruling. Then why appeal it? Because they're worried about the larger precedent -- as the NBC News report noted, "Justice officials appeared to be concerned by the precedent the order would send in overturning a top administrative decision."

In other words, putting aside the specific issue at hand, the administration believes it has a responsibility to follow through with legal defenses of its policy decisions, even if they were political decisions they no longer fully endorse. It's a we-have-to-go-through-the-motions defense.

The second, and more important, angle is that the administration believes it has an alternative solution to the underlying problem. Just 24 hours before the disappointing appeal, officials also made a related announcement that may have crossed your radar screen.

U.S. regulators on Tuesday lowered the age limit for Plan B One-Step emergency contraception, approving it for sale to girls as young as 15 and agreeing it will be available without a prescription and on store shelves instead of behind pharmacy counters, Food and Drug Administration officials announced.

This appears to be part of an attempted compromise. The administration is effectively saying to the reproductive rights community, "Don't worry about the appeal; we just cleared Plan B for everyone 15 and up anyway, and that policy will go into effect immediately while the lawyers go through the motions at the 2nd Circuit."

It's not a bad pitch, I suppose, but as Irin Carmon explained yesterday, the far better option would have been for the administration to simply follow last month's ruling.

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Michael Potter, the Eden Foods founder and CEO, is one of the folks suing the Obama administration over its policy covering contraception as basic preventive care. Salon's Irin Carmon asked him why.

"Because I'm a man, number one and it's really none of my business what women do," Potter said. So, then, why bother suing? "Because I don't care if the federal government is telling me to buy my employees Jack Daniel's or birth control. What gives them the right to tell me that I have to do that? That's my issue, that's what I object to, and that's the beginning and end of the story." He added, "I'm not trying to get birth control out of Rite Aid or Wal-Mart, but don't tell me I gotta pay for it."

That's a doozy of a quote, so let's unwrap it a bit.

First, plenty of men are capable of supporting women's access to contraception. It's troubling some find this confusing.

Second, comparing birth control to whiskey is kind of odd.

Third, the federal government tells Potter and other business leaders to pay for all sorts of things -- minimum wages, safety equipment, etc. -- they might otherwise not want to pay for. That's not grounds for a lawsuit; it's generally just considered the literal bare minimum of modern corporate responsibility. Indeed, under federal health care law, employees who get their insurance through their employers will get all kinds of benefits without a copay, but notice that Potter isn't suing over eye exams or colonoscopies.

And fourth, under the Obama administration's compromise, Potter and other opponents of contraception don't have to pay for the coverage directly, anyway.

All of which is to say, there must be something more to this. Potter wouldn't bother hiring a bunch of lawyers to sue the administration if he actually believed "it's really none of my business what women do."

So, Carmon pushed further.

Why sue over this if he had no particular issue with contraception, as the suit -- "these procedures almost always involve immoral and unnatural practices," his court filing explained -- clearly alleges he does out of religious conviction? Well, he said, he opposes "using abortion as birth control, definitely."

Of course, this doesn't make sense, either. Contraception isn't abortion, and abortion isn't covered under the health care law. Potter did look into this before filing a federal lawsuit, right?

The CEO added, "I'm not an expert in anything." That's good to know.

He went on to say, "I am qualified to have an opinion about what health insurance I pay for." That's true, though he's doing more than having an opinion -- there's that federal lawsuit -- and under the administration's existing policy, he still doesn't have to pay for birth control.

I floated by him the fact that contraceptive coverage is cheaper to pay for than, say, maternity coverage.

Potter replied, "One's got a little more warmth and fuzziness to it than the other, for crying out loud."

Well, it's good to know this business leader has given this such serious thought.

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In the Obama administration's first term, officials made some historic strides when it came to contraception access, but there was one important misstep. In December 2011, the administration overruled the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, ignored the available science, and said Plan B-One Step, the so-called "morning after pill," will not be available over the counter to anyone under the age of 17.

It was the wrong call, which was largely inexplicable in light of all the correct calls the administration has made on this issue. This morning, the decision was undone by a federal court.

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Food and Drug Administration to make the "morning-after" emergency contraception pill available without a prescription to all girls of reproductive age.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Edward Korman in Brooklyn, New York, comes in a lawsuit brought by reproductive-rights groups that had sought to remove age and other restrictions on emergency contraception.

Korman described the FDA's rejection of requests to remove age restrictions to obtain the pill had been "arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable." The ruling added that the 2011 decision from HHS was "politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent."

All of those criticisms, incidentally, have the benefit of being true.

The district court ruling ordered the FDA to lift the existing restrictions within 30 days, though whether that actually happens will be based at least in part on whether the administration appeals.

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It's been nearly two years since the Obama administration announced that under the Affordable Care Act, contraception would be covered as preventive care without a co-pay. Though this initially didn't cause much of a stir, the right eventually freaked out -- employers, the GOP argument went, shouldn't subsidize birth control they consider morally offensive.

The White House has tried to accommodate the concerns. A year ago, President Obama unveiled a compromise: religiously affiliated institutions won't be required to pay for birth control directly, but women who work for these employers will still have access to the same preventive care as everyone else. The right said that wasn't enough, so there was another compromise: separate insurance plans for contraception.

Some folks are proving hard to please, as we saw in this Columbus Dispatch report over the weekend (via Taegan Goddard).

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine signed a letter this week to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services, urging that an exemption to the coverage mandate extended to certain nonprofit religious organizations be broadened to include private employers who object to contraception for religious reasons.

DeWine said last night that requiring business owners to include prescriptions such as the morning-after pill, which critics say are abortive, as an employee insurance benefit could be a "direct contradiction" to the religious beliefs of some employers.

DeWine, a U.S. senator before his 2006 defeat, argued, "They're being forced to provide insurance coverage that violates their religious beliefs. They're being forced to provide insurance coverage for a form of abortion. To me, it's a religious-freedom issue."

Catch that use of the "a" word in there?

According to Ohio's attorney general, birth control, including the morning-after pill which prevents pregnancies, is "a form of abortion."

And as such, it makes sense, according to DeWine, to empower employers to deny the women who work for them access to contraception as part of their health care plans -- even if employers aren't being asked to pay for the birth control directly, and even if it's covered under a separate insurance plan that the employer isn't paying for.

The Republican interest in combating contraception access did not end in 2012.

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No one can blame President Obama for lack of effort. A year and a half ago, the White House determined that under the Affordable Care Act contraception would be covered by insurance plans as preventive care without a co-pay. And ever since, the president has tried to shape compromises that satisfy the concerns from religious opponents of birth control.

A week after Obama's latest effort, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops still isn't satisfied.

The nation's Roman Catholic bishops on Thursday rejected the latest White House proposal on health insurance coverage of contraceptives, saying it did not offer enough safeguards for religious hospitals, colleges and charities that objected to providing such coverage for their employees.

The bishops said they would continue fighting the federal mandate in court.

I'm not sure what more the White House can do to make the policy more tolerable for contraception opponents.

Let's recap how the latest administration compromise would work. Let's say you're a woman who works at a religiously affiliated university and you want to take birth control pills, which school administrators have decided are too sinful to pay for. Your employer will offer you a health care plan that doesn't cover the medication, but the university's insurance company will then automatically create a new, separate insurance policy that will cover your contraception for free.

You still get the pills, the preventive care is still available with no co-pay, and your employer no longer worries about subsidizing -- or even being tangentially involved with -- your health care choices that it might choose to find spiritually offensive.

It's not enough, the bishops said.

The bishops said the proposal seemed to address part of their concern about the definition of religious employers who could be exempted from the requirement to offer contraceptive coverage at no charge to employees. But they said it did not go far enough and failed to answer many questions, like who would pay for birth control coverage provided to employees of certain nonprofit religious organizations.

"The administration's proposal maintains its inaccurate distinction among religious ministries," said Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. "It appears to offer second-class status to our first-class institutions in Catholic health care, Catholic education and Catholic charities. The Department of Health and Human Services offers what it calls an 'accommodation,' rather than accepting the fact that these ministries are integral to our church and worthy of the same exemption as our Catholic churches."

Of course, in the United States, it doesn't necessarily matter what the leaders of one faith tradition think about the law as it relates to birth control -- the bishops don't get veto power. They can lobby, pressure, and speak out, and they can even refuse to cover all of the health care needs of their employees, but they can't simply reject the law.

The bishops can, however, sue. And as of yesterday, the legal challenges against contraception coverage will continue.

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Way back in August 2011, the Obama administration announced that under the Affordable Care Act contraception would be covered by insurance plans as preventive care without a co-pay. Though the initial reaction was silence, conservatives were eventually told to be outraged, and a controversy ensued -- should employers subsidize contraception even if they find birth control morally offensive?

In February 2012, the White House responded to complaints by unveiling a compromise: religiously affiliated institutions won't be required to pay for birth control directly, but women who work for these employers will still have access to the same preventive care as everyone else.

The right, which is more opposed to birth control than many realized, wasn't satisfied. So, as Sarah Kliff and Michelle Boorstein reported, the administration has a brand new compromise.

The Obama administration proposed broader latitude Friday for religious nonprofits that object to the mandated coverage of contraceptives, one that will allow large faith-based hospitals and universities to issue plans that do not directly provide birth control coverage. [...]

The new proposal aims to find middle ground between faith-based nonprofits, such as universities and hospitals, that have a religious opposition to contraceptives, and women's health advocates who vociferously supported the required coverage of birth control without co-payment.

It all seems a bit silly, but then again, so does conservatives' preoccupation with birth control.

How would this work? Let's say you're a woman who works at a religiously affiliated university and you want to take birth control bills, which school administrators have decided are too sinful to pay for. Your employer will offer you a health care plan that doesn't cover the medication, but the university's insurance company will then automatically create a new, separate insurance policy that will cover your contraception for free.

You still get the pills, the preventive care is still available with no co-pay, and your employer no longer worries about subsidizing -- or even being tangentially involved with -- your health care choices that it might find religiously offensive.

I don't doubt that many on the right will find new reasons to object to this new compromise -- it doesn't cover private-sector employers who also oppose birth control -- but Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, approves:

"This policy delivers on the promise of women having access to birth control without co-pays no matter where they work. Of course, we are reviewing the technical aspects of this proposal, but the principle is clear and consistent. This policy makes it clear that your boss does not get to decide whether you can have birth control.

"Birth control is a basic and essential component of women's preventive health care. Women have been fighting for access to birth control for decades, and this is a historic advance for both health care and equality. As one of the nation's leading providers of reproductive health care, Planned Parenthood has led the charge for access to contraception for nearly a century, and we will continue to work tirelessly to ensure that women have access to birth control without hurdles or co-pays."

Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, added, "We applaud the Obama administration's unwavering support for implementing the Affordable Care Act in ways that will ensure women have access to basic preventive care, including contraception. That is a fundamental promise of reform, and a critical advance for women's health."

You know we've reached a strange point in the political discourse when the right wants to compare President Obama to Hitler, while Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) wanted to compare himself to Martin Luther King.

Two weeks ago, Cuccinelli urged his allies to be willing to "go to jail" to resist the Affordable Care Act's provision that treats contraception as preventive medical care. As Evan Mcmorris-Santoro reported, this week, the state A.G. took this argument to the next level.

In a radio interview, Cuccinelli, Virginia's Republican gubernatorial candidate this year, explained his belief that opposition to contraception coverage is effectively the same thing as the fight for civil rights. He argued:

"Whenever I talk about religious liberty, you know they turn it around. All they talk about -- they don't talk about denying religious liberty. They talk about contraception. And I'm not talking about contraception. Government doesn't have a role in contraception. Government does have a role in protecting your civil rights especially today on MLK Day. The man who really came up with the American non-violent protest theory of civil disobedience. It's pretty egregious that they can't get any higher than contraception when we're talking about protecting people's religious liberty."

Cuccinelli has also begun citing King's Letter from Birmingham Jail for support.

Just so we're clear, in the mind of Virginia's attorney general and GOP gubernatorial candidate, there's a moral equivalence between the fight against racial discrimination and the fight to prevent covering birth control as preventive health care.

And for the record, Cuccinelli wasn't kidding.

Just to reiterate, not only is the comparison ridiculous on its face, but the hysteria surrounding the underlying policy is wholly unnecessary.

Under federal law, insurance companies must now make preventive care available without copays. It was up to the Obama administration to establish what counts as "preventive care" and officials chose a variety of common-sense policies, including mammograms, HIV screenings, immunizations, and contraception.

No one will be required to have any of these services; they'll simply be available. In terms of finances, the Obama administration exempts churches and other houses of worship from financing care they may find objectionable, and the White House also created a compromise in which religiously-affiliated employers wouldn't have to pay for contraception directly.

That's it. That's the entirety of the "controversy."

For the far-right Virginian, this policy is so excessive, people should simply ignore the law and invite punishment -- and he's a modern-day King, leading the fight, because allowing private employers to deny basic medical coverage to their employees is a matter of "religious liberty."

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Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) told supporters this week that they should "defy and or break the law" in order to resist the Affordable Care Act. Of course, the opinions of some strange former congressman, booted out of Congress after one term, probably don't carry much weight.

How about a man who may be elected governor of Virginia later this year?

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the presumptive GOP gubernatorial nominee and a rising national figure on the right, told an Iowa-based radio show Wednesday night that opponents of a federal mandate for contraception coverage should be willing to "go to jail" to fight the law.

Cuccinelli, who also addressed the Iowa Republican Party's Lincoln Day Dinner last spring, told conservative radio host Steve Deace that he strongly supports the lawsuit by Hobby Lobby Stores against the Affordable Care Act's requirements for contraception coverage.

In the interview, Cuccinelli shared an exchange he had with his own Roman Catholic bishop who told him, "Well, you know I told a group I'm ready to go to jail" to fight contraception access. Cuccinelli replied, "Bishop, don't take this personally: You need to go to jail."

The right-wing state A.G. added, "What I mean by that is, people need to see it play out all the way to its logical conclusion."

Keep in mind, Cuccinelli isn't saying he's prepared to go to jail; he's just saying people who think the way he does should be prepared to go to jail.

Here's hoping his allies don't take this advice.

In case anyone's forgotten, the policy Cuccinelli finds so outrageous is actually pretty routine, and hardly worth risking incarceration over.

Under federal law, insurance companies must now make preventive care available without copays. It was up to the Obama administration to establish what counts as "preventive care," and officials chose a variety of common-sense policies, including mammograms, HIV screenings, immunizations, and contraception.

No one will be required to have any of these services; they'll simply be available. In terms of finances, the Obama administration exempts churches and other houses of worship from financing care they may find objectionable, and the White House also created a compromise in which religiously-affiliated employers wouldn't have to pay for contraception directly.

That's it. That's the entirety of the "controversy."

For the far-right Virginian, this policy is so excessive, people should simply ignore the law and invite punishment.

The 2012 elections offered a variety of lessons, but one of them seemed to be that the American mainstream wasn't comfortable with the Republicans' bizarre preoccupation with reproductive health, most notably, contraception access. Apparently, some missed the message.

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For much of the last two years, Republican policymakers have targeted contraception access in ways unseen in decades, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), eager to position himself as a national party leader, wants the GOP to change course. At least a little, anyway.

In an op-ed published today in the Wall Street Journal, the Republican governor even goes so far as to say oral contraceptives should be sold "over the counter without a prescription."

As a conservative Republican, I believe that we have been stupid to let the Democrats demagogue the contraceptives issue and pretend, during debates about health-care insurance, that Republicans are somehow against birth control. It's a disingenuous political argument they make.

As an unapologetic pro-life Republican, I also believe that every adult (18 years old and over) who wants contraception should be able to purchase it. But anyone who has a religious objection to contraception should not be forced by government health-care edicts to purchase it for others.

It'd be helpful if Jindal explained his policy position in a little more detail, but based on the op-ed, it looks like he's taking one step forward and two steps back.

The good news is, the governor says, as a general policy, he doesn't want to restrict access to contraception -- this automatically puts him to the left of Rick Santorum and his allies -- and sees value in making birth control available over the counter. The op-ed is silent, however, on specific controversies over access to emergency contraception and morning-after pills.

It also does not address the issue of cost. Sure, it's unusual for a Republican with national ambitions to talk about making contraception available without a prescription, but the larger policy argument has been about making preventive health care available to Americans without copays. There's also been a spirited debate over public support for institutions like Planned Parenthood, where so many Americans are able to receive affordable preventive care, and Jindal's op-ed is silent on this, too.

But it's the part about "religious objections" that underscores an even larger problem.

Remember the Blunt Amendment? That was the Republican proposal, named after its lead sponsor, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, that would have allowed employers who provide health insurance to their employees to decide whether those workers can have access to birth control (or vaccines, or HIV tests, or anything else the boss might find morally objectionable).

Jindal's op-ed says the "government shouldn't be in the business of banning [contraception] or requiring a woman's employer to keep tabs on her use of it." That's nice, but no one is suggesting employers keep tabs on employees' use of contraception. The question is whether those employers can, on a whim, deny employees' contraception access as part of their health insurance plan.

And based on this op-ed, it sounds Jindal still supports the point of the Blunt Amendment.

If Jindal's WSJ piece is supposed to be evidence of progress on women's health care and conservative politics, Republicans still have a ways to go.

The last time Mitt Romney's campaign ran into real trouble on contraception, it dispatched South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) to argue, "Women don't care about contraception.... The media wants to talk about contraception."

Republican policymakers were, at the time, pushing legislation -- at the state and federal level -- to restrict access to birth control, but for Romney surrogates, the sensible response was to say contraception doesn't matter.

Today, it happened again.

Kerry Healey, Romney's lieutenant governor in Massachusetts, fresh off her borderline-comical turn in the post-debate spin room last night, sat down with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell today, and the host asked questions Healey presumably expected, noting Romney's support for the Blunt Amendment, for example.

Inexplicably, the Romney surrogate described the consequences of the candidate's own proposals as "some hypothetical situation." Healey added that even having a discussion about women being able to afford contraception is a "peripheral" issue.

This arrogant attitude is extraordinary. Under Romney's preferred agenda, employers can end contraception coverage for their women employees, and millions of Americans would no longer be able to afford birth control.

Asked to defend this right-wing nonsense, the Romney campaign's defense is that the question is irrelevant -- as if the issue is so trivial, it's not even worth their time.

If this is Team Romney's attempt to appear in touch with the needs of working families, it's likely to backfire.

Postscript: On a related note, Ed Gillespie said he was "wrong" last night to explain that Romney opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. For those keeping score at home, the Romney campaign, over the course of less than a day, has had no position on the law, been opposed to the law, and then supportive of the law.

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In last night's debate, President Obama went on the offensive over contraception access.

"...Governor Romney feels comfortable having politicians in Washington decide the health care choices that women are making. I think that's a mistake. In my health care bill, I said insurance companies need to provide contraceptive coverage to everybody who is insured, because this is not just a health issue; it's an economic issue for women. It makes a difference. This is money out of that family's pocket.

"Governor Romney not only opposed it; he suggested that, in fact, employers should be able to make the decision as to whether or not a woman gets contraception through her insurance coverage. That's not the kind of advocacy that women need."

Mitt Romney insisted the charge isn't true.

"I'd just note that I don't believe that bureaucrats in Washington should tell someone whether they can use contraceptives or not, and I don't believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care or not. Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives. And the president's statement of my policy is completely and totally wrong."

So, who's right? The key here is Romney's claim about employers.

As Kaili Joy Gray noted this morning, "Romney supported the Blunt Amendment to allow employers to decide whether their employees should have access to contraceptives. That's what the Blunt Amendment did, and Romney said at the time, 'Of course I support the Blunt Amendment.'"

Under the Blunt Amendment, any employer could deny employees' contraception access as part of their health insurance plan. Romney endorsed the proposal, as did his running mate, Paul Ryan.

I can appreciate why the Republican finds this embarrassing now, but when he says, "I don't believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care or not," that's the exact opposite of what he told voters earlier in the year.