A USA Today editorial makes the case that religion is the prime mover at the Food and Drug Administration, and is shocked (shocked…) to think of one group imposing its values upon another in “a nation founded on religious freedom and personal choice.” The outrage comes after the release of a report (PDF) from the Government Accountability Office charging the agency with following an “unusual” decision-making process when denying emergency contraception, or the “Plan B” “morning-after pill,” over-the-counter status. After the FDA declined an opportunity to argue the other side in the paper, in true “balanced news” fashion, Wendy Wright, VP of Concerned Women for America, took up the challenge, charging Barr Laboratories, the maker of Plan B, with not just facilitating teenage promiscuity, but deliberately encouraging it, by telling college girls to have multiple sex partners with inadequate protection. Moreover, in the sort of hodge-podge assault that conservative contraception critics favor, Wright offered bite-sized arguments about increased STD rates, sexually-abused minors, and, most bizarrely, a cabal of shadowy Thai men who “slip” Plan B contraceptives to women like they were roofies. What’s to be learned from all this, besides that, to this partisan ear, the critics’ arguments are as spare and ludicrous as ever? Maybe that the question of religious influence on government agencies — absent from USA Today’s actual newspiece on the story, except by implication — is too important to be covered just by two talking heads drilling home the party line.