The Chris Christie girth control watch and fat jokes have returned to TV amid chatter about a brokered Republican nominating convention.

On Tuesday night, Comedy Central's Jon Stewart used the New Jersey governor's recent veto of a bill legalizing same sex marriage to go after his size. “Chris Christie seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of marriage equality, specifically the equality part,” Stewart said. “It’s surprising, since he too is a member of a group that society does not always grant a full measure of respect. I’m referring, of course, to Christie’s choice to live openly as an obese American.” There followed a parade of GOP hopefuls — Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum among others — mouthing doctored utterances that substituted "fat" for "same sex" marriage. Subtle it wasn’t.  

I’m really looking forward to viewing this evening’s match in Arizona. CNN’s John King will again be moderating and questioning the remaining Republican candidates, just as he did last month in South Carolina before that state’s primary.

As we all recall, King opened the discussion on the South Carolina panel by provocatively asking Newt Gingrich about a sensitive period in his second marriage. The inquiry was timely because the same day, in a televised interview on ABC, Marianne (my personal favorite of the former speaker’s three wives) told Brian Ross and The Post’s James V. Grimaldi about the time when her soon-to-be former husband thought what might save their marriage would be if he could continue to have sex with his then-mistress, Callista. 

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Just what a political fight needs – a
Recording Artist and American Idol 2 runner-up Clay Aiken. (Frederick M. Brown - GETTY IMAGES) marquee “American Idol” veteran.

North Carolina’s own Clay Aiken has released a video opposing an amendment to the state constitution that would define marriage as between a man and a woman.

“This amendment just goes too far,” says Aiken.

The popular “Idol” runner-up, who is gay, is just one of the voices taking sides before the May 8 vote. The Coalition to Protect All NC Families, organizations dedicated to defeating Amendment One, features Aiken’s message that the step would harm the rights of children in families that “look different.”

Though same-sex marriage is already against the law in North Carolina, the state legislature – which switched from Democratic to Republican control in the 2010 elections – voted last September to put the measure on the May ballot. North Carolina is the only state in the Southeast that has not amended its constitution to define “traditional” marriage, a fact that is a point of pride or shame, depending on which North Carolinian you ask.

The beauty of the current birth-control conversation for Democrats is that they not only have public opinion on their side but have cannily managed to make contraception a front-burner election-year campaign issue -- by complaining that Republicans are making it front-burner election-year campaign issue.

The answer, in other words, to the many who are wondering why the Republicans would want to ride such a losing pony is: They don’t.

(View more videos from the birth-control debate.)

“No one is making birth control a topic,” Rick Santorum’s longtime media consultant and friend John Brabender told me. “It’s not an agenda that anyone’s running on. But it’s a distortion that works to [the other side’s] benefit to imply we’re for limiting access to birth control.’’

The narrative that it’s conservatives who won’t stop talking about pills, sponges and contraceptive foam is probably set in stone at this point; a story in Tuesday’s Washington Post reports that contraception has “suddenly become an obsession of the 2012 presidential campaign. To many observers, it seems that the clock has indeed been turned back.”

The first two such observers quoted in the piece are leaders of the contraception lobby, whose job is to monetize real and perceived attacks, exactly as their counterparts on the right do: “As Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, said incredulously on Saturday during a rally in Austin: “Somehow in this country, in 2012, this election might turn on whether women should have access to birth control.’ “

Incredulously, or hopefully? It’s Democrats like Richards who keep saying this is what the election will turn on. Which is smart, if you are Cecile Richards, because for any campaign or cause these days, outrage is oxygen. (See Komen vs. Planned Parenthood.) And if the election does turn on contraception, her team wins.

When I looked back at a tape of what Republicans have been saying on the topic, what’s striking is how reluctant they are to go there.

Yes, even including Santorum’s 71-year-old bankroller, Foster Friess, whose assets may until now have buffered him from the news that his jokes need work.

Single women have been all over the news lately, in a terrific look at the solo life in The Post’s Style section, and in a front-page New York Times report that the majority of babies born to American women under 30 have unmarried moms. Turns out, the ratio of unmarried to married has been “steadily rising for five decades.” When I was single and pregnant in 1971, I had no idea I was setting a
(Waltraud Grubitzsch - AFP/Getty Images) trend.

I was 22, and housewives at St. Paul mahjong tables gossiped at my brazenness.  I came from a middle-class home but was taking a less culturally traditional route to adulthood. I had dropped out of college, lived in Mexico under precarious circumstances, knocked around Europe, had no idea how to contact my nomadic boyfriend and no expectation of a wedding should he turn up.

My casual fertilization was not an accident but the result of an insanely naïve notion: I wanted a companion, a small clone who would be my sidekick and best friend.

When I landed back at my horrified mother’s house in St. Paul, I was in my sixth month. She begged me to consider adoption, asked me not to embarrass my grandmother by visiting her high-rise apartment building unannounced, and warned me that I was ruining my life (oh yes, and that of my unborn, “out of wedlock” and “illegitimate” child).

 She was wrong.  My life did become more stable and my daughter, who was well loved (especially, it turned out, by her reluctant grandmother) thrived. 

But I was, nonetheless, way over my head. I was clueless about parenting and still shudder when I think of the careless risks and unrealistic expectations the hapless hippie mommy I was then visited on my tot’s tiny curly blond head.