But to make matters worse, Secretary Clinton and the administration have linked this dumbing-down of religious freedom to their ramping-up of what they frankly call the “LGBT agenda” as a priority concern of U.S. international human-rights policy. On the one hand, religious freedom is hollowed out, abroad and at home. On the other hand, the LGBT agenda — the logical endgame of the sexual revolution’s gnosticism and antinomianism — is given priority in the human-rights agenda of the U.S. government around the world, while other planks in the libertine platform are imposed by coercive state power at home. Leviathan is nothing if not consistent.

Then there are the sexual revolution’s cultural impacts. At the risk of salaciousness, go back to that scruffy Dutchman’s claim in 1994, ponder it a moment — and then see if it doesn’t become piercingly obvious that there is a direct line of connection between that vulgarity and the implicit claim in much of the Komen/Planned Parenthood and HHS-mandate brawls: namely, that the transmission of human life is a disease to be “prevented.” Which, of course, means that children are not the fruit of love and a precious gift to be received with gratitude, but another lifestyle choice to be indulged at the whim of the imperial autonomous Self.

Where this is all leading is not pleasant to contemplate. But if Leviathan is to be confronted, and defeated, in his attempt to impose the sexual revolution by brute state power, a critical mass of morally serious minds have got to get clear on one crucial point: The invention of the oral contraceptive was, with the splitting of the atom and the unraveling of the DNA double helix, one of the three world-historical scientific developments of the last century — scientific accomplishments that have within themselves the capacity to change culture and history in fundamental ways. By effectively sundering sexual expression from procreation, modern contraceptives have done something their less-effective predecessors were unable to do for millennia: They have created a contraceptive culture that identifies fertility with disease and willful infertility with “health.” Those who celebrate that culture are not interested in compromise: They are interested in having everyone pay for what they want, and in levying serious penalties on those who won’t truckle to their will.

The issue, it might be added, is not family planning. The Catholic Church, for example, teaches that all couples have a moral responsibility to plan their families. The question at issue is one of means: What methods of regulating fertility are congruent with the dignity of human beings and especially the dignity of women? That, in fact, is the question that ought to have been posed to that vulgar Dutch activist 18 years ago. It remains to be pressed home today.

One final point. At the beginning, the 2012 election was about jobs, jobs, and jobs. The culture wars have now reshaped the race, and the stakes, as Iran may eventually do in another sphere of policy. But what the Komen/Planned Parenthood and HHS-mandate battles ought to have made clear is that 2012 is, domestically, an election about the survival of civil society. Will Leviathan continue to trample the institutions of civil society at the behest of the champions of lifestyle libertinism? Will such institutions as marriage, the family, and the Church be permitted to exist only insofar as they become wards of the state, or simulacra of the state?

That, and nothing less than that, is the question the past several weeks have put before the American people.

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By George Weigel

George Weigel is an American author and political and social activist. He currently serves as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Weigel was the Founding President of the James Madison Foundation.