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Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum was asked at a campaign event in New Hampshire earlier this month, if he would abort a gay baby. The Christian evangelical candidate avoided the question but has been dogged at campaign events on his controversial views on gender, reproductive rights, and gay rights. He is not alone in his views. On Sunday, another GOP candidate, Newt Gingrich, called for an investigation of in vitro fertilization clinics where couples struggling with infertility, attempt to conceive. Gingrich has accused front runner Mitt Romney of being pro-abortion. However, Romney has maintain his solid anti-abortion credentials. In a new book entitled Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution is Polarizing America, historian, author, and Huffington Post writer Nancy L Cohen investigates what she calls “a shadow movement deep within both parties that is responsible for America’s current political crisis.” The fact that issues of contraception, abortion, gay rights, and more are deemed such important political litmus tests at a time when economic injustice threatens to tear apart the fabric of American society, is a testament to the strength of the sexual counter-revolution — the backlash to the feminist and gay rights revolutions from the extreme right that have increasingly dominated the nation’s politics. In Delirium, Nancy Cohen asks the question of “Why, when the United States is mired in its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, would birth control, abortion, and the rights of gays and women top the agenda of the Republican Party?” But Cohen also maintains that “the sexual counterrevolution has been a bipartisan affair,” indicting the Democratic Party of political calculation at the expense of women’s and gay rights. Even President Obama has waffled, saying that his views were “evolving.”

GUEST: Nancy L Cohen, historian, author, and contributor to The Huffington Post. She is the author of two books, including The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Business History Review, and elsewhere.

Visit Nancy Cohen online at www.nancylcohen.com. Follow her on twitter.com/nancylcohen.