In 2008 in Colorado, a rebel faction of anti-abortion activists decided to pursue a “personhood” initiative. They proposed amending the state’s constitution to redefine “person” to include zygotes. “From the moment of fertilization,” a woman would be considered two people under Colorado law. When the initiative went before voters, it failed by more than 40 points.

The same activists brought up the measure again in 2010. They changed the language to “the beginning of biological development,” but the intent, and the electoral result, were the same.

The mainstream anti-abortion movement opposed the Colorado effort because its members believed a challenge to it might have the unintended effect of reaffirming Roe v. Wade. They also worried that a blunt effort to ban all abortion might cause a backlash that would set back their incremental chipping away at abortion rights.

But voters seem to have rejected “personhood” for a different reason: legally redefining a “person” would not only criminalize all abortion but would probably outlaw hormonal forms of birth control as well. Hormonal contraceptives generally prevent an egg from being fertilized.

In Colorado’s U.S. Senate election in 2010, the Republican candidate, Ken Buck, endorsed the initiative. He later backed off, but Democrat Michael Bennet hammered Buck throughout the campaign. As the political map turned deep red that year, Buck lost.

Undeterred, the “personhood” folks tried again in Mississippi last year. It failed there, too, and by double digits. After a grass-roots campaign that included a “Save the Pill!” rally and billboards saying the measure would make “birth control a lethal weapon,” Mississippians voted it down by 16 points.

After Mississippi rejected “personhood” and its threat to contraception, after Colorado rejected it twice, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul attended (Paul by satellite) a Personhood USA candidates forum in South Carolina. All signed a pledge to pursue “personhood” at the federal level. Mitt Romney did not attend, but when asked before the Mississippi vote last year whether he would have supported such a measure as Massachusetts governor, he replied, “Absolutely.”

This is critical context for understanding the scrum over health insurance and contraception. Taken together – Republicans’ condemnation that birth control be a required benefit of health insurance, their insistence that Planned Parenthood lose all federal funding, their threat to cut federal Title X support for birth control and their support for “personhood” measures – today’s GOP candidates are all Ken Buck.

There is no constitutional infirmity in requiring religious institutions to follow the same insurance and labor regulations as other employers. Twenty-eight states already require that health insurance plans cover contraception; eight states do not even exempt churches from that requirement, as the Obama administration’s rules would, even before the president announced an expanded religious exemption on Friday.

New York, whose Catholic archbishop has railed so vehemently against the administration on this issue, already lives under the rule he decries – it’s state law. The rule is also partly enshrined in federal law thanks to a December 2000 ruling of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The right has picked a fight on this issue because religiosity is a convenient partisan cudgel to use against Democrats in an election year.

Despite that, some Democrats and even some liberals have embraced their logic. The thinking inside the Beltway seems to be that religious voters will turn against Democrats unless the White House drops the basic idea that insurance should cover contraception.

Time will tell on the political effect of this fight, but the relevant political context here is more than just a 2012 measure of Catholic bishops’ influence on moral issues. It’s also this year’s mainstream Republican embrace of an anti-abortion movement that no longer just marches on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade to criminalize abortion; it now marches on the anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, holding signs that say “The Pill Kills.”