Basically it's like people turning "banning of public school prayers" to "you can't pray in schools" and screaming how their rights are violated?
Only in the sense that it's totally blown out of proportion like that yeah.
It's basically a "The religious people in charge want to tell everyone what to do but don't you dare tell them what to do," issue. It's all a bullshit right wing spin campaign to drum up election year opposition to Obama. Look at the wording. "Contraceptives," can mean a lot of different things that traditionally you pay for yourself. "Birth control," means those little pills to everyone. See how the second one is a narrower category (which happens to be more accurate)? Fewer people are opposed to "birth control" (pills is implied) than "contraceptives" in the US and the people who tried to run this spin campaign knew this.
Rush Limbaugh was part of this spin campaign but he grossly miscalculated. He really fucked up when he called her a "slut" and "prostitute" and tried to make the undertone that all "womens' rights activists" were also sluts and prostitutes.
Because his logic went that if she wanted the government to pay for a part of her having sex, then that made her a prostitute and he called for her to post a sex tape online "if we were paying for it; we should get something."
This is all part of a wider right wing spin campaign in support of the "War on Women." Bans or restrictions on abortion, forced ultrasounds, lack of funding and support for domestic violence prevention and remedy programs, saying being a single mom is a form of child abuse (they say dads prevent it and they don't say shit about single fatherhood being abuse), and also it seems they don't even like any form of contraceptive now.... It's a puppet show designed to distract you from long, pointless wars where we sink in $Trillions of dollars to accomplish very little while screaming there's no money for anything, eroding civil rights, a dismal economy, rich people and corporations paying lesser tax percentages than you, our crumbling infrastructure, the cost of college and lack of opportunity to rise in society through hard work, and every other thing they don't want you to focus on.
They know it's an election year, and they don't want you focused on that stuff. Instead, focus on some stupid little thing that gets people's attention, and let's have it be about sex, kinda, cause that'll keep their focus. Can you see the fucking strings?
And, once they started to realize just how incredibly badly Rush Limbaugh had fucked up and that it was going to cost them money, they immediately started blaming everyone but him. It couldn't possibly be that he's a right wing hate machine who randomly took a vocal blow torch to some innocent woman just for expressing her opinion. Rather, Ms. Fluke is a "liberal plant" (her fault), and this was all a trap set up and faked by "the left" (their fault). The advertisers that pulled out, "they're saying they don't want your [his listeners'] business." (their fault). "The drive by media" is also blowing this way out of proportion. (their fault). Because apparently Mr. Limbaugh can do no wrong and certainly not something completely despicable, like this.... Nobody believes his apologies, because they are forced and he also says things that void them right after he gives them.
Now that I see all the spin Limbaugh's been doing, I'm just dizzy. It fits right into his usual crap about how "liberals hate America" because we don't like his version of it. Naturally, he sees his version as the only legitimate one. Anything else is "Un-America." His way is the only right way and he can do no wrong, says he and his supporters. This was all a vast conspiracy to get Limbaugh, set him up and knock him down a peg? Or did he finally get shown for what he is?