Reporters have circled around the Broaddrick story for more than six years now, trying to confirm it, treating its radioactive allegations against the president with understandable caution. Now, with impeachment over, the Wall Street Journal chose to run an interview with Broaddrick on its editorial page, penned by Dorothy Rabinowitz, a journalist best known, ironically, for her work debunking false claims of sexual abuse.

Rabinowitz did not try to debunk Broaddrick’s claims. She depicts her sympathetically, as a woman twice victimized: once by Clinton, and then again by NBC News, which Rabinowitz says interviewed Broaddrick and at least four corroborating witnesses, but then sat on the story, presumably out of political cowardice.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorialists go further than Rabinowitz in accusing NBC News of playing politics with the truth. “With the revelations about the Juanita Broaddrick story by Dorothy Rabinowitz,” a Friday Journal Review and Outlook speculated huffily, “perhaps NBC President Andy Lack will stop censoring his news division.”

But significantly, the Journal’s own news division didn’t produce the Broaddrick story. It was the work of an editorial board member, not a reporter, and it ran on the paper’s notoriously anti-Clinton editorial page. The Broaddrick story is indeed a window onto the world of journalistic decision-making, but the view isn’t exactly what the Journal’s editorialists would have you see.

As told to Rabinowitz, Broaddrick’s story is this: She was a 35-year-old Clinton campaign volunteer who met the Arkansas attorney general when he visited the nursing home she owned during his initial run for governor. Clinton invited her to visit him any time she traveled to Little Rock, and she did, calling his campaign office when she attended a conference there the very next week. Clinton proposed meeting for coffee, Broaddrick told Rabinowitz, and then, when the restaurant proved to be crowded, suggested they have coffee in her hotel room.

Once there, Clinton embraced Broaddrick, and when she resisted, according to Rabinowitz, “He got her down onto the bed, held her down forcibly, and bit her lips.” Rabinowitz goes on: “The sexual entry itself was not without pain, because of her stiffness and resistance.” Afterwards, Clinton allegedly told Broaddrick not to worry about pregnancy, because mumps had left him sterile, and suggested she put ice on her swollen lips.

According to Rabinowitz, Broaddrick’s story was corroborated by a “friend,” Norma Rogers, who found Broaddrick in her room “in a state of shock — lips swollen to double their size, mouth discolored from the biting, her pantyhose torn in the crotch.”

“To encounter this woman, to hear the details of her story and the statements of the corroborating witnesses, was to understand that this was an event that took place,” Rabinowitz concludes — an astonishingly uncritical acceptance of the most heinous charge ever leveled against the president. Rabinowitz criticizes NBC for sitting on the story for nearly a month even though it had been “exhaustively investigated” and “NBC researchers had combed through the Broaddricks’ entire lives, through dusty basement files and court records.” The interview took place on Jan. 20, the weeks passed and the NBC feature never ran. Why? Rabinowitz sarcastically quotes NBC News president Lack’s “simple, uplifting message”: the story needed to be fact-checked to ensure it was “rock-solid” journalism.

In fact, many news organizations have tried to confirm Broaddrick’s story and failed. It was first revealed by Phillip Yoakum, a gadfly Republican businessman who says the nursing home owner told him about it in 1981. In 1992, he urged Broaddrick to come forward in a letter he later gave to the Paula Jones lawyers.

“I was particularly distraught when you told me of your brutal rape by Bill Clinton,” he wrote. “What a shock to now realize he will possibly be the president of a free democratic country while carrying the guilt of such an assault on someone as undeserving as you … I believe that you will continue to be irreparably psychologically damaged by your decision to continue to hold this brutal rape inside.”

As part of his campaign to get Broaddrick to tell her story, Yoakum admitted in the letter, he had taped her version of it and given the tapes to Sheffield Nelson, a Republican who ran against Clinton for governor in 1990. Yoakum said he told the story to the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press just after Clinton’s presidential nomination. But he refused to release the tapes, and both news organizations dropped the matter.

It remained dropped until Broaddrick’s name appeared in Starr’s subpoena of Jones lawsuit materials last March. At that time, Yoakum’s letter was released, and the Washington Post ran it, omitting Broaddrick’s name. On March 28, Lisa Myers broadcast an interview with Yoakum in which he made his allegations about the rape. She also quoted an unnamed friend of
Broaddrick, whom she did not name, who confirmed that Broaddrick had told
her the same story.

The rape allegation became news again in December when House Republicans began showing sealed materials on Broaddrick, then still known as Jane Doe No. 5, to House members wavering on impeachment. House Whip Tom DeLay was also urging senators to view the files full of unconfirmed allegations against the president, which were stored in the Ford Office Building, prompting Democrats and even some Republicans to object. At the time, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., told Salon the Broaddrick allegations were “unconfirmed hearsay,” and called DeLay “totally irresponsible” for urging senators to look at the sealed materials as they prepared for the impeachment trial.

Over the past year many reporters have looked into Broaddrick’s allegation and come away unconvinced.

“This is a story that’s been knocked down and discredited so many times, I was shocked to see it in the Journal today,” says Jack Nelson, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. “Well, not shocked, since it ran on the editorial page. Everyone’s taken a slice of it, and after looking at it, everyone’s knocked it down. The woman has changed her story about whether it happened. It just wasn’t credible. I don’t know if NBC will run it, but if they do, they’ll do it knowing there are real problems with it.”

Significantly, the Wall Street Journal’s own news department has declined to run the Broaddrick story in its pages. When asked if Journal reporters had pursued it, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, Alan Murray, replied, “I’m not going to comment on how we devote our resources. But you’re right to observe this has not appeared in our news pages, except in brief references.” The Journal was the first to report that House managers were showing Starr’s sealed “Jane Doe” material, Murray says. Later, in its Washington Wire column, the paper revealed that House Judiciary Committee counsel David Schippers had decided not to include the Broaddrick materials in the impeachment trial, since she had given different versions of the story and there was no evidence of obstruction of justice by the Clinton administration in the changed tales.

But Journal editor Robert Bartley told Salon in an e-mail: “We would not have been comfortable with the Broaddrick story if we hadn’t had first-hand interviews with her and others. Except for NBC, no one else had the interview. It ran on the editorial page because it was an editorial page project. We often do our own reporting, as in the previous Dorothy Rabinowitz stories on the child-abuse scare, which over the years freed four people from prison.”

Clearly, Rabinowitz’s coup was getting an interview with Broaddrick, who has refused to talk with any other reporters besides Myers. But her concept of corroboration is a little weak, relying solely on friends and family members to whom Broaddrick told the story. Rabinowitz makes much of the fact that Broaddrick recalls looking out her hotel room window with Clinton at an old jail house and hearing him say that when he became governor he was going to renovate the place (an ironic memory, given the prison scandals that rocked Clinton’s term as governor). “The building was later torn down,” Rabinowitz reports breathlessly, “but in the course of their searches, NBC’s investigators found proof that, as Mrs. Broaddrick said, there had been such a jail at the time.”

NBC officials declined to comment on the story, except to say it was “still alive,” in the words of Lisa Myers. But a network source told Salon that while Broaddrick seems “credible,” NBC is still trying to get “independent” corroborating evidence.

“I have a hard time being critical of a news
organization if their rationale for holding an interview is to be sure that
it reflects an accurate story,” says Sandra Baron, executive director of the Libel Defense Resource Center and a former attorney
for NBC News.

Other news organizations don’t adhere to NBC’s newsgathering standards. Matt Drudge began airing the Broaddrick charges after NBC stalled the story, accusing the network of political cowardice. Six days after Myers’ interview with Broaddrick, Drudge charged, “White House pressure has network brass on pause,” alleging that a “civil war” had broken out within NBC over whether to run the story, with Tom Brokaw allegedly threatening to quit if Myers’ interview ran.

Fox News then aired Broaddrick’s allegations Feb. 3, complete with her friend’s tale of swollen lips and torn pantyhose, dispensing with the formality of interviewing Broaddrick herself. Rounding out the conservative pressure campaign, the Moonie-owned Washington Times then reported on alleged White House attempts to block the Fox story.

Will the Wall Street Journal story liberate other media organizations to pursue the Broaddrick allegations? Not so far. The story was briefly mentioned Friday morning on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” when Charles Gibson commented that it was “strange” and “curious” that the well-worn tale had appeared on the paper’s editorial page instead of its news pages.

What do I know? “Coming Apart” is No. 9 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, and it’s been reviewed, with varying degrees of respect, almost everywhere that matters. The good news is, even on the right, some critics reject Murray’s fatalism. I practically never agree with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, but in his review of “Coming Apart,” he acknowledges that finding “ways to make it easier for parents to manage work-life balance when their kids are young” might help working-class families stay together, and maybe even more important, that “high incarceration rates” are to blame for the shortage of men in low-income communities. Douthat and I found some common ground there, thanks to Charles Murray.

David Frum, a conservative with whom I agree more frequently, wrote a magisterial five-part takedown of Murray’s book here. Frum writes about something I’ve been harping on lately: the way government worked to create the American middle class after the twin shocks of the Great Depression and World War II. He notes that the so-called greatest generation was also “the statist generation,” and ties the troubles of the white working class to the decline of industries as well as policies that once provided it with security and economic mobility. Contrary to Murray’s depiction of a golden, harmonious age of unfettered capitalism, Frum shows that it wasn’t unfettered capitalism that created the mythical middle class; it was quite fettered capitalism.

I winced at one line in Frum’s review, though, and that’s when he noted that he still admires “Losing Ground.” I’m not sure how Frum can be so right about “Coming Apart” and so wrong about “Losing Ground.” Murray’s 1984 work held that poverty programs were to blame for worsening poverty, since they supposedly rewarded indolence and punished two-parent families, and he paid special attention to rising rates of welfare recipiency and single parenthood in low-income black communities. Since then, we sponsored a massive social experiment based on Murray’s claims: We ended welfare as we knew it, requiring that recipients either work or engage in serious job training and capping eligibility at two years consecutively and five years lifetime.  While it may have (briefly) looked as though welfare reform encouraged industry in the underclass, more poor people got jobs in the 1990s largely because there were more jobs for the getting: 22 million were created in the eight years of the Clinton administration. Those trends have since reversed, and all the while rates of single motherhood continued to climb. Murray was as wrong about black families in 1984 as he is about white families today.

“On Point” host Tom Ashbrook did a great job parrying Murray’s claims, but we didn’t spend much time discussing Murray’s genetic fatalism. This book continues where “The Bell Curve” left off: It warns that the nation is splitting into a highly educated, highly privileged elite (the residents of his composite “Belmont”) and an increasingly large lower class (the denizens of fictional “Fishtown”). At bottom, though, Murray believes that the widening gulf is due to modern society finding better ways to identify and reward the highly intelligent among us. And since IQ is “intractable” – Murray no longer uses the words “genetic” or “innate” – the various ways we decide to structure society and create opportunity won’t make much of a difference. As I come from a people – Irish Catholics – whose median IQ has climbed along with the opportunities provided to us, I know that Murray is wrong. IQ is not destiny.

I’ve written at length about my problems with the book, and with Murray’s attributing the success of America’s uber-class to their industriousness and religiosity along with their superior intelligence. I don’t need to rehash it. But in preparing for the debate I found an interesting exchange in an online chat hosted by the Wall Street Journal that displays Murray’s thinking on these issues even more clearly than his carefully phrased and (slightly) nuanced book does. One reader asked whether predatory banking conditions in low-income communities might play a role in their unraveling, and Murray quite simply said no.

We’re talking about IQ more than culture. It helps to be living in a neighborhood where smart actions about money are common, but the main breakdown is IQ. Lots of smart people in Fishtown do the right thing, but (politically incorrect warning) there are more smart people in Belmont than in Fishtown.

If you’re looking for a quick synopsis of “Coming Apart,” you’ve got it right there.

Murray closed our debate by telling Ashbrook that he’s pessimistic about reversing these trends. I said I’m optimistic. I joked on Twitter today that my (almost finished) book is a rejoinder to Murray’s pessimism. Maybe I’ll call it “Coming Together: How the White Working Class Woke Up and Realized the Right Now Thinks They’re Dumb and Lazy, Too.” Given the role of race and racism in dividing the Democratic Party, I believe the naked class bias of the GOP might help white working-class voters see that by voting Republican, they’re dismantling the opportunity society that once made success more widely possible.

I needn’t have soft-pedaled. Only a few hours later the bishops came out, guns blazing, insisting the only solution they would accept would be for “HHS to rescind the mandate for those objectionable services.” By any employer, for any employee in the entire country — a country where the vast majority of voters, and of Catholics, support Obama’s stand. And at Sunday Mass, bishops and parish priests throughout the nation read aloud the stunningly political letters about the controversy they already had planned. Now, with the bishops’ blessing, Republican are hard at work on legislation that would force HHS to strip the contraceptive coverage requirement for all employers, not just religious employers. Sen. Roy Blunt would allow employers to decline to cover any service they deem objectionable; Sen. Marco Rubio would restrict the legislation to contraception coverage.

I have a couple of reactions to the bishops’ extremism. First of all, as someone raised Catholic, I wonder why they’ve never read letters about any of their social justice priorities: universal healthcare, increased protection for the poor, labor rights, or action to curb climate change? Why does this topic  – not even the morally challenging issue of abortion, but the universally accepted practice of birth control – merit such a thundering reaction from the pulpit?

Second, as an American, I also wonder: How do they continue to demand tax-exempt status when they’re railing in their churches about blatantly political – and divisively partisan – public concerns? As the first writer on my remarkably sane Catholic tribalism letters thread remarked, their public support for the extremist GOP position makes me think they should register as a Republican political action committee rather than remain a tax-exempt religious institution outside the bounds of politics.

Even as the bishops became more shrill and extreme, the debate over contraception coverage became smarter and calmer last week. Major Catholic organizations supported Obama’s Friday move, including the Catholic Health Association, Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities and Catholic Charities USA. Before the president’s announcement, famed attorney David Boies did the most to usher in the new tone by framing the HHS rules as a matter of labor law. Boies doesn’t believe, by the way, that HHS is in any way required to provide the exemption for churches it wrote into its regulations even before the compromise. If the church is employing people, whether co-religionists or not, it has a responsibility to comply with employment law. He proved that even the administration’s initial regulations, exempting churches, was a strong attempt at accommodating anti-contraceptive religious groups.

But maybe the best argument on behalf of the Obama administration’s position comes from a very unlikely source, as Jay Bookman points out: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In two different decisions, the conservative Catholic Scalia has sided with the court majority in finding that religious teachings can’t justify religious employers – or employees — failing to comply with labor law. In the 1990 Employment Division v. Smith decision, regarding an employer’s ability to fire a Native American employee who used peyote, despite the employee’s claim that using the drug was a religious rite, Scalia wrote:

“We have never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate. On the contrary, the record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition.” In an even more directly relevant 1982 decision holding that Amish employers must comply with Social Security and withholding taxes, though their faith bars participation in government support programs, Scalia wrote:

Respondents urge us to hold, quite simply, that when otherwise prohibitable conduct is accompanied by religious convictions, not only the convictions but the conduct itself must be free from governmental regulation. We have never held that, and decline to do so now.

I’ve written repeatedly that my inability to quit the Catholic Church entirely comes from the fact that its social teachings formed my social conscience, and to this day some of the people doing the most good for the poor and the excluded are devout Catholics. But the bishops are impossible to defend. Today, they are working on behalf of the Republican Party. “They have become the Pharisees,” says Andrew Sullivan, a conservative practicing Catholic. “And we need Jesus.”

I’ll be discussing the bishops’ GOP politicking on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 pm ET.

But the new agreement makes it possible for women’s groups and some liberal Catholic leaders to maintain a truce on hot-button social issues while working together around issues of women’s health and universal access to healthcare. Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America are happy with the solution, and so is Sister Carol Keehan of the Catholic Health Association, who endured withering heat from the bishops and their right-wing allies over the ACA. Kristen Day of Feminists for Life likewise backs the deal. Even New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan called it “a step in the right direction,” though he demanded more time to examine the fine print and suggested “legislation will still be required” to protect the church’s right to discriminate against women.

The bishops and the entire 2012 GOP field will continue to fight their culture wars, but the White House apparently believes the non-compromise will win them the middle ground and make the 24-7 cable news show wailing and hand-wringing – even by some liberals – go away. We’ll see.

But what just happened? Why did we spend 10 days listening to prominent Catholics, including even some liberals and Democrats, insist that the White House had overreached and trampled on “religious freedom” – in this case, the “freedom” of the Catholic hierarchy to impose rules that even most Catholics don’t live by?  The great E.J. Dionne led the charge, but Catholic Democrats like Sens. John Kerry and Bob Case and Virginia’s Tim Kaine joined in, and occasionally, liberal TV hosts like MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and Chris Matthews seemed inclined to depict the controversy as being about the church’s right not to violate its own values. Vice President Joe Biden was said to be the leading voice within the administration warning Obama away from the issue.

“This has struck a tribal nerve in Catholicism,” conservative Catholic scholar George Weigel said to Chuck Todd on “The Daily Rundown” last Monday. “The Catholic Church has been beaten up over the last 10 or 11 years and I think Catholics are tired of the government and others beating up on the church.” His liberal co-religionist on the panel, E.J. Dionne, agreed. I found that fascinating, especially because most of us consider tribalism a bad thing in a multi-ethnic democracy.

Still, while I didn’t share that reaction, I recognized it. It amazes me sometimes, the extent to which Catholics still see themselves – ourselves — as outsiders. There’s a vestigial impulse to circle the wagons and protect our right to practice our persecuted religion (even if it’s no longer persecuted, and many of us don’t practice very much of it anymore). Where does it come from? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this lately, because the importance of Catholics to the old New Deal coalition, and their ongoing status as key swing-voters in key swing states, makes understanding them – us – important. This same old tribalism leaves many Catholics receptive to GOP blathering about out-of-touch “elites” who supposedly disrespect their religious freedom. It helped shift many white working-class Catholics to the Republican Party in the ’60s and ’70s.

There may be an element of remorse involved when liberal Catholics defend their faith, especially among those who defy the church (rightly, in my opinion) on its most blinkered teachings in the realm of women’s rights, gay rights and sexuality. For some it may be guilt: OK, I might not listen to the bishops, but I think we ought to demand that they’re respected in the public sphere. And for some it may be grief: We grew up with a rich tradition of social responsibility and spiritual meaning that’s unfortunately been warped by leaders who worship worldly power and have odd views about sex as well as women. While the child abuse scandal makes most Catholics sick, sometimes even I wince when non-Catholics judge the whole church by the corruption of a comparative (though very powerful) few.  I have cousins and uncles and aunts who’ve joined religious orders (though, truthfully, most of them left). I don’t like seeing all of them considered perverts or pedophiles, or people who cover up for predators.

How Catholics work out their complex feelings about the church matters beyond the tribe, if only because they’re crucial to the 2012 election. One in four voters is Catholic, and Obama won a majority in 2008, while Republicans won them back in 2010. Obama lost white Catholics, however, although he won among those who say they aren’t regular churchgoers.  I think Catholics remain an important, not always predictable constituency at least partly because of their own unresolved, unpredictable feelings about their religion, and their status as Americans.

I found myself thinking a lot about my own complicated feelings about my heritage as I watched Catholics grapple, not always rationally, with the contraceptive controversy. Even when I didn’t agree, I empathized.

- – - – - -

I grew up in a huge Irish Catholic clan on Long Island, but as an adult, I put away childish things (in the words of St. Paul, though not as he intended them) and became a secular feminist liberal Democrat. The first time I remember feeling anything like tribalism was after Sept. 11.

Many liberals around me criticized the overt religiosity of the public mourning for those killed that day, all that talk about God, which struck me as reflexively and needlessly anti-religion at a time when many Americans — dare I say most — found comfort in their faith. Then, after a benefit for survivors’ families turned a little rowdy, with one cop taking to the stage to say “Osama bin Laden can kiss my royal Irish ass,” the heavily Irish and Catholic cops and firefighters in attendance were roundly derided as right-wing tribalist rubes. That bothered me, too: Who did we think died trying to rescue those trapped in the World Trade Center, Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore? Members of my own family had worked in the rescue operation after the towers fell. I wasn’t down with the mockery.

A lot of my belated tribalism was a class thing: I’m not workin-class, but my parents and aunts and uncles were, and some of my cousins are still part of that ill-defined and disappearing demographic. There’s clearly an element of snobbery in the way the white working class is routinely run down as backward, racist, narrow-minded yahoos, and I’ve grown to resent it.

Yet in general, Catholics are doing pretty well for themselves. We’re well represented in certain segments of the American elite, especially elite punditry, it seems.  It’s understandably hard for some people to imagine, in a world so striated by race and class, how Catholics could feel like oppressed outsiders. Yet it’s also true that while we’ve only elected one black president, we’ve only elected one Catholic president as well. I’m not trying to equate the struggles of black people and Catholics. In fact, it’s especially when you understand how relatively privileged Catholics have been, compared to African-Americans, that having only one Catholic president stands out, and makes you wonder: Why?

It’s hard not to conclude that some residue of the religious nativism that persecuted and stigmatized Catholics in the 19thcentury, defeated Al Smith in 1928, and forced John F. Kennedy to promise he wouldn’t take orders from the pope in 1960 persists to this day. So even if we haven’t personally experienced anti-Catholic prejudice, and I can’t say I have, there’s an atavistic memory, something bred in the bone, that forces many of us to defend our once-persecuted church, even when we profoundly disagree with it.

But it wasn’t until I debated the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins on “Hardball” this week that the craziness of the right-wing Catholic alliance with conservative evangelicals became particularly obvious to me. They’ve locked arms with some of the very forces that once persecuted their ancestors – some of whom still despise Catholicism to this day. On “Hardball,” Perkins posed as a defender of the Catholic bishops’ position on Obama’s contraception rules. But he’s also been an ally to virulent anti-Catholics like Rev. John Hagee, who called the church “the great whore” and a “false cult.” And Rev. Robert Jeffress, who likened the church to Satan and labeled Catholicism a “fake religion.” Like Zionist Jews who’ve made common cause with right-wing evangelicals over Israel, some Catholics are lining up, in the name of religious freedom, alongside folks who want to wipe out their religion. I’ve heard some liberals express disdain for some of the church’s teachings, but I’ve never heard anyone compare it to Satan or call it a whore.

Zealous right-wing Catholics are in the minority, even if blowhards like Bill Donohue sometimes make the most noise. In the end, I think the contraceptive flap forced a lot of Catholics to reckon with the gulf between what they practice and what their church preaches.  The truth was always there, if we wanted to find it, not merely in polling data that said 98 percent of sexually active Catholics have used birth control, but that solid majorities of Catholic voters supported Obama’s contraception regulations applying to large Catholic institutions, like hospitals, charities and universities, that employ non-Catholics. I loved the fact that students at Catholic universities held a press conference Thursday to support the president, and that organizations like Catholic Democrats and Catholics for Choice were active and vocal in standing up to their own bishops.

There are a lot of outstanding questions about the implementation of the administration’s non-compromise. But I have to disagree with Esquire’s Charles Pierce – I’m not sure that’s ever happened before – and say I don’t consider this any kind of cave on the president’s part or victory for the bishops. I prefer the interpretation of Frances Kissling, founder of Catholics for Choice, who wrote on Friday that the “accommodation” made the bishops the “losers” and women the winners. ”When the White House cares more about what a simple Catholic sister, [Sister Carol Keehan], thinks than about what the bishops think, Catholic women can applaud. Perhaps the crack in the patriarchy is becoming a deep canyon.”

I can’t go that far – especially after seeing this Think Progress report that documented what we all knew: that men dominated the debate over the controversy on cable news. It’s also a little sobering that so many of the liberal Catholic voices questioning the president were male, while most of the liberal voices backing him were female. But between this and the victory for Planned Parenthood in the Komen mess a week ago, I see evidence that we’re reaching a new place in the battle over gender. At the very least, being a woman is no longer a preexisting condition, as the Catholic Nancy Pelosi likes to say.

I’ve tried to make the same points: What if Catholics didn’t believe in child labor laws? Would we let church-run agencies flout them? Boies used the example of a religion that believed people shouldn’t work after age 60: Could they legally ban older people from employment? Of course, they could do neither. This is indeed an issue of religious freedom: the freedom of non-Catholics not to be bound by the dictates of the Catholic Church in the workplace.

But Boies, fresh off his 9th Circuit victory defending gay marriage, brought the legal knowledge. Watch below.

Of course, the very same night, the re-surging Rick Santorum offered the most shrill and hysterical reaction to the White House ruling, and in a week of shrillness and hysteria, that’s saying a lot. Santorum actually said that President Obama’s contraception ruling meant we are “headed down [the] road” to the French Revolution and the “guillotine.” That’s below, too.

If you watch the entire seven-minute clip, you’ll understand why, despite Santorum’s latest surge, I do not believe that even today’s Republican Party, though it’s been hijacked by the ultra-right, is capable of nominating him for president. Like so many right-wingers, he absolutely mangles what the Founders believed about religion. He says one problem with the French Revolution is that its slogan of “liberty, equality and fraternity” substituted fraternity, or “brotherhood,” for “fatherhood,” a reference to God the father, but also his right-wing belief in the centrality of male control to family and national stability. But his absolute craziness is best displayed in his remarks about the guillotine:

They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.

Although Santorum said we’re “a long way from that,” he insisted that with the Obama presidency “we are headed down that road.” But watch the whole thing. Boies first, then Santorum. Reason before crazy. I’ll be talking about all of this on MSNBC’s “Hardball” today at 5 p.m. ET.

Reason:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Now crazy (h/t Crooks & Liars):

Predictably, the GOP presidential candidates are whacking Obama on the issue; fittingly, Rick Santorum is surging again, as this latest battle in the culture war rages. As always, the biggest hypocrite is  Mitt Romney, who is attacking the president’s decision even though he went along with the same regulations in Massachusetts. And when the state enacted the universal health insurance law he used to be proud of, it covered the same “family planning services” as the new HHS regulations.

I knew the president’s decision would be controversial, but I underestimated the firestorm he would face. Since 98 percent of Catholics practice forms of contraception forbidden by the church at some point in their lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control, I assumed many of them would speak out in favor of the new regulations. How could they expect the president to follow church teachings if they did not?

I was wrong. Too many Catholics are insisting that while they may personally disagree with the church on contraception, they defend the bishops’ opposition to the HHS moves as a matter of “religious liberty.” Others are silent. But silence lets the most right-wing forces of reaction prevail. It’s time for the 98 percent to speak up.

This is indeed a matter of religious liberty – the liberty of non-Catholic women who work for Catholic employers to have the full spectrum of healthcare coverage, regardless of what the church believes.

Twenty-eight states already require church-run agencies to cover contraception in the health insurance they provide employees. Catholic Charities sued to oppose the regulation in New York, and lost. The world didn’t end; Catholic agencies in New York and those 27 other states now cover contraception. And they should: Women who have access to family planning services have lower infant mortality rates and healthier babies than those who don’t. Others take the birth control pill to deal with endometriosis or other reproductive system issues. Contraception has to be part of comprehensive healthcare for women.

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday, Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod left the door open to a compromise with the bishops. That sounded dangerous. The worst move for the administration would be to take a courageous stand, rile up the right wing and Catholic bishops, and then cave and demoralize the women’s health advocates who are mobilizing to support the president. Later on “Daily Rundown” liberal Catholic E.J. Dionne suggested possibilities for compromise on the issue, while ultra-conservative George Weigel shot him down. There will be no “compromise” that leaves everyone happy. Either this is a matter of equity and the right approach to women’s health, or it’s not. And Catholics who ignore the church’s teaching on this issue have a special duty to speak up.