Ahead of this November’s elections, Rewire will increasingly be looking at issues in the political landscape and how they relate to reproductive health. This is one of those cases.

Tuesday’s LA Times ran an article that included a quote few of you are going to believe. Under the headline “Christian Coalition is Splintering,” John W. Giles of the Christian Coalition (CC) of Alabama is quoted: “The Christian Coalition is drifting to the left.”

What?! If this is the case, then where, do tell, is the right? Much less the center?

Giles was referring to the national CC’s email action alert urging support for net neutrality, and asserting that such a priority reveals an abandonment of anti-gay and anti-abortion activism (hardly the case). Before you follow your understandable inclination to dismiss Giles’ comment as a sign of potential insanity, consider it as part of a larger trend.

The nation’s most watched Senate race is pitting arch-conservative Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) against Democrat Bob Casey Jr., and reproductive health is one of the primary issues being watched in the race. But when it comes to the standard RH political issue—reproductive choice—there is no debate. Both candidates oppose access to abortion, to the point where Casey has even shied away from protecting access in cases of rape and incest. While we are glad to see Casey bringing other issues to light, like the need for programs to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancy and his opponent’s disapproval of contraception, it is striking to note that the “center” in this national race has moved markedly to the right on this issue.

Or consider that Florida, which held primaries Tuesday, featured a primary race between incumbent Republican State Senator Jim King and Randall Terry, spokesperson for the parents of Terri Schiavo and former founder of Operation Rescue (now Flip Benham’s Operation Save America). Terry’s campaign centered around his far-right conservatism, and attempted to smear King for not being conservative enough. While King has a broad legislative history, he also garnered the endorsement of the NRA—Jim King is hardly “indistinguishable from a liberal Democrat,” as Terry’s campaign site claims. (Terry lost, winning about a third of the vote.)

In all three cases, we can see attempts to validate far-right extremism by comparing it to center-right (or even less-far-right) positions. When political positions are determined based on their relative positions on an imaginary scale, someone like Randall Terry has to recalibrate the scale so that a Jim King looks like a left-wing liberal. Otherwise, voters would never believe Terry might be a reasonable voice from the right. Radicalism, after all, is only determined by its relativity to other positions.

While this trend is not about to break forth in every district across the country, its increasing prevalence is something to be noted by reproductive health advocates. Plenty of critics have drawn attention to the implications in the PA Senate race—it’s a given in that race that abortion rights are beyond the pale of the debate, and the debate has turned to whether or not contraception and other preventative measures should be encouraged.

But at least in that case the debate is still happening on a national scale, in the public limelight. If these other two cases were to take root and spread to other states and districts, many RH advocates may be far less equipped for a response. People like Giles and Terry would pursue radical causes at local levels, where they could find much more favor than they would enjoy at a national level. And there is a strong chance they would find less resistance, too.

For the past two years, interested parties have watched with wonder as the Republican Party succeeded in keeping the White House and both houses of Congress, and then proceeded to unravel itself. Iraq, immigration, and most recently, Plan B, have been contentious internal issues, but the less-publicized debate has been between traditional conservatives who would shun the national arena for a more radical federalism, and the neo-conservative philosophies that have been so integral to Bush administration policies. One group attempts to work through the Administration and challenge Supreme Court decisions while the other side sets about pursuing city councils, school boards, and state legislatures, largely out of the public eye.

Whether these two groups are united and are pursuing similar causes at every level of government or whether their practices are a kind of “policy anarchy” that has achieved an accidental stasis may well be revealed by the results of this November’s elections. If the Republican Party continues to fracture, it will remain to be seen which of these groups will rise to dominance. And depending on which one rises over the other, it could have very different results for how opponents of good reproductive health policies proceed with their activism. Advocates for reproductive health would do well to be aware of both possibilities.