Mays signed some autographs for kids who happened to be hanging out, and then walked me into clubhouse manager Mike Murphy’s tiny office, where I sat, tape recorder in my outstretched hand, and we talked when we weren’t being interrupted by visitors. I asked how he felt about the title “greatest living baseball player,” which Joe DiMaggio had reportedly demanded be used whenever he was introduced for public appearances.

“I don’t know what Joe wanted, but I don’t have a problem, if he wanted to do that. He was my hero. Joe was the best all-around player. Joe was the best. I only played against him once, in the ’51 Series.”

I ask what current players he would put in the same league as himself and DiMaggio, and he answers quickly: “There’s only two guys you could put there: Griffey and Barry” — Ken Griffey Jr. and Mays’ godson, Barry Bonds — “for all-around. A lot of guys put numbers on the board, but only those two do it all.” He’s equally unequivocal on the question of his best play ever: “The catch off Bobby Morgan in Brooklyn was the best catch I ever made. Jackie Robinson and Leo Durocher were the first people I saw when I opened my eyes. Jackie came out to see if I caught the ball. He was a very good competitor.”

But he thinks it’s silly to try to pick a best season. “I didn’t think like that, about best seasons. What if you thought ’97 was your best year — what would you do now? I never looked back. I couldn’t dwell on last year’s season. I always looked forward. I never worried about what other people were doing — except the guy I was playing against.”

Then Giants broadcaster (and ESPN celebrity) Jon Miller popped his head in, mock-introducing himself to his old friend Mays, who deadpanned, “Hi, I’m Jim Brown.”

While they bantered, I saw Mays’ humor, and his legendary profanity, which he kept in check the rest of the time with a female reporter. Miller confided that he was known for his “Willie Mays stance” when he played Little League, and Mays, not believing that the portly broadcaster had ever picked up a bat, demanded the names of his teammates.

“I said I played Little League,” Miller averred.

“I heard what the fuck you said,” Mays came back. “I wanna know who played with you.”

“Nobody,” Miller confessed. “Nobody who was any good.”

Miller relates that when he was in New York recently, he saw somebody filming a TV commercial with Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter playing stickball. Mays explodes in laughter: “Jeter don’t know about no stickball, he never played in his whole life. He’s a good ballplayer, but where’s he from? Michigan? Maybe he plays hockey, but he don’t know stickball.”

I ask about his stickball-playing days as a rookie. “We played with a mop handle, cut the top off. The stick was small; the ball was small, too. We played it in Birmingham, we called it something else altogether, ragball or something. It was different, we threw the ball in the air. We’d steal mops, we’d cut them off. We’d play on 155th Street in Harlem, we’d play in between the cars. And if you hit it over the roof you were out.” I ask why, and he cackles. “Because you’d lose the ball! You got to hit the ball for location.

“I played stickball in the morning, around 10, for about an hour. There was a bunch of kids. They’d come and knock on my window, ’cause my window was on the ground level. I could walk from where I lived down the street to the Polo Grounds. So I’d buy the kids ice cream, then go to the ballpark. I did that all year in ’51, and in ’52 till May, when I went into the military.” I mention that manager Leo Durocher had problems with his stickball, and he smiles.

“Leo didn’t want me to play there — he didn’t want me to get tired. But it was good for me, playing with the kids was good. That’s how I learned to hit the breaking ball. Guys would bounce the ball to you, and you’d have to hit it, and sometimes it would bounce this way, that way. That’s a breaking ball. I could hit anything that moved — the change-up, breaking ball, curveball.”

Mays is happiest reminiscing about great plays and games and players of years gone by. His hearing’s going, but his memory for baseball detail is incredible. Miller tells a funny anecdote about a hit Mays got off Mets pitcher Jon Matlack, and Mays volunteers, “I remember that game! They beat us 7-1. It was a change-up; I could always hit the change-up.” He recalls a legendary extra-inning doubleheader against the Mets and volunteers, “Galen Cisco pitched eight shutout innings, and then in the ninth gave up two runs,” remembering like it was last year, instead of more than 30 years ago.

At that point manager Dusty Baker dropped in, apologized for interrupting, and told Mays that someone from the players’ union had phoned to ask if Mays would host an awards ceremony that had in the past been graced by Hank Aaron and Joe DiMaggio.

“Why didn’t they call me?” Mays demands.

Baker smiles. “He was afraid to call you.”

“Tell him to pick up the damn phone,” Mays retorts, then asks for the number.

And about a minute later, in walks Giants star Barry Bonds, (Mays played with Bonds’ father, Bobby, in the Giants’ outfield in the late 1960s and early ’70s). They have a cryptic exchange; it seemed Mays was trying to put Bonds in touch with someone who’d pay him for an appearance. “Guy didn’t call you?” Mays asks. “OK, I’ll call him. I don’t wanna hold you up. I’ll let you know.” The $10 million-a-year-superstar leaves, and his godfather shakes his head: “He’s gotta earn some money? He needs money like he needs a hole in the head. Give me the money. Why’m I tryin’ to get him fuckin’ money?”

Then Miller says goodbye, mentions he’s going to England for vacation when the season’s over and jokingly invites Mays to come along. Mays says a quick no. “I ain’t never been to Europe. I like it over here. What am I goin’ over there for? What am I gonna do over there? It’s cold in England.” He notices Miller isn’t wearing a jacket (you need one at Candlestick, even in June) and insists, “Where’s your jacket? The Giants didn’t give you a jacket? I’ma bring you a heavy jacket, Bally’s is always givin’ me jackets. You need a jacket.”

When we get back to our conversation, I ask if he would like to have managed. He says no. “I didn’t think I would be a good manager. Maybe I had too much expectations, I just felt I wouldn’t be good at it, and I don’t like to do anything I’m not good at. I know the game, but I don’t think I could sit there day in and day out and watch baseball. Even when I was playing the game, I used to get up, come in the clubhouse, walk around. I couldn’t watch it all. Maybe I was nervous.”

Periodically Mays would lapse back and forth from past to present tense when talking about his playing days, which ended 26 years ago. Asked about his favorite manager, he insists, “I never had a favorite manager. I never had a manager that bothered me. As long as they leave me alone.” I mention reading he’d feuded with Clyde King, the Giants manager in the late ’60s who tried to make him bat leadoff, and he shrugs. “Clyde didn’t bother me, he just was the type of guy who didn’t tell me the truth. We just had problems, that’s all.

“I got along with all of them. As long as they leave me alone out on the field. I could do things on the field a manager couldn’t tell me to do, because a manager doesn’t know what I can do — sometimes I don’t even know myself. Bill Rigney and I had a problem the first year. When a new manager comes in they have new ideas. When I talked to him I said, Bill, just leave me alone, and after four or five months, he did. And we would become very, very good friends.”

But the conversation took a bad turn when I asked about the years he was banned from baseball, and it never righted itself.

“I wasn’t out of baseball long. It was two years. Two years. It was short.”

I acknowledge it was a brief period.

“Well, say it, then. Say what it was: Two years. I was only out a year and a half, really.”

And the interview went south from there. When I tried to change the subject to happier times — last year, when the Giants announced they would name the plaza outside their new ballpark “Willie Mays Plaza,” and build a statue there in his honor — Mays got even more ornery.

“Wouldn’t it be moving for you if you had a statue put up of you? You wouldn’t appreciate that? Anybody who’d have a statue put up about him, and don’t appreciate it, then there’s something wrong with the person. I’m kind of curious why you’d ask me a question like that. I’m having a statue built while I’m alive to see it, and I think it’s tremendous.”

It was a bad moment; in 20 years I’ve never had an interview turn so sour. I apologized to Mays for upsetting him, and wrapped up the interview.

“It don’t matter. You’ll write what you want to write. I’m just me, I’ll be me from day one till the day that I’m gone. That’s just me.”

“Something tells me, that if the upcoming election could be decided on social issues, the Republicans could win that in a landslide, because we are on the right side of the culture war,” he said. “The problem is, we’re scared to death of it. The Republican establishment wants no part of it.”

Smart Republicans are indeed afraid of the culture wars – because they know they’re on the losing side. Sadly, there aren’t very many smart Republicans anymore; or at least there aren’t very many who will stand up to extremists in their base and say enough is enough on their jihad against birth control.

A majority of women voters, 51 percent, now approve of the job Obama is doing, according to the weekly Gallup tracking poll, up from a low of 41 percent last August (only 43 percent of men approve.) A Democracy Corps poll taken from Feb. 8-13 found Obama now leads Mitt Romney 65-30 among unmarried women, an 18-point swing since November. (Yes, Democracy Corps is run by Democrats, but they regularly deliver bad news for their party when their polls require it.) Women may also be behind some more bad news for Republicans: A majority of seniors, thought to be the party’s base, now view the GOP negatively, according to Democracy Corps. Most seniors happen to be women.

It’s not only women who disapprove of Republican extremism on contraception, though: a New York Times poll this week found that two-thirds of all voters support requiring health care plans to cover the whole cost of birth control – including almost three-quarters of women. By the way, Catholics support the measure 67-25. The only group that has a problem with it is evangelical Christians, the core of the GOP base.

Please remember that all three of those polls were taken before Thursday, when Rick Santorum’s money man Foster Freiss made his idiotic joke about aspirin serving as birth control (if it’s held tightly between the knees, a joke straight out of a ’50s locker room) and Darrell Issa assembled only men on a panel to talk about what women can do with their bodies.

That’s why Rush Limbaugh can’t even keep up the pretext that contraception is a winning issue for his party throughout an entire broadcast. During the very same show in which he told Republicans they’d win if the election was decided on culture-war issues, he also accused Democrats of starting the birth-control debate to hurt Santorum. But how can it hurt him if a culture war is good for Republicans? None of his callers asked him that question. Here’s more of what he said:

The whole point of bringing up contraception and trying to make it look like the Republicans want to ban birth control is simply something to excite the Democrat base, which has been depressed as it can be because their president has done a rotten job.  The economy is in the tank.

Of course, Limbaugh is wrong about that too. The economy isn’t great, but it’s improving and voters are giving the president better marks for that, too. Also: the base isn’t depressed. The Democracy Corps poll found that Republican Party extremism combined with the improving economy is revving up the Democratic base again, pulling what they call the “Rising American Electorate” of young people, unmarried women and non-white voters back behind Obama and his party. Meanwhile, it’s the GOP base that appears depressed, with turnout either flat or down in every primary and caucus except South Carolina.

Even Michael Steele didn’t try to spin the bad news for his party on “Hardball” today. I did catch him trying to blame Obama for craftily making the contraception debate about…contraception. How dare he?

Here’s my “Hardball” conversation with Steele. I had the easy side this time.

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The other factor in my dismissing Santorum is that I’ve assumed Romney’s money would demolish Santorum the way it did Gingrich. And it may yet. But if Wednesday marked the opening of Romney’s scorched-earth campaign against Santorum, it didn’t scorch anything.

Romney’s anti-Santorum ads are weak tea, compared with his ads against Gingrich.  I even went to Rickfacts.com to find the outrages behind the ads. There aren’t any. Maybe Tea Party voters can get exercised over Santorum’s support for earmarks, raising the debt ceiling and other government spending, but I sort of doubt it. The worst thing Romney’s got on him is that he voted to restore the voting rights of certain felons, along with Hillary Clinton, in 2003. That makes me like Santorum a little bit, which I’m sure is a sign it will appall the Tea Party. Still, Clinton isn’t as polarizing as Nancy Pelosi, who relishes her role in bringing Gingrich down with that cozy, couch-sitting climate change ad. Romney’s new barrage makes me wonder if maybe, there isn’t that much material to use trashing Santorum. Or at least not much that Romney can use.

The Obama campaign would have endless material, should Santorum survive the Romney contest. But the former Massachusetts governor can’t attack Santorum’s extremism, because on most social issues he’s gone out and joined him over on the far right. Now, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough says Romney folks are quietly behind several new media revelations about Santorum’s contraception extremism. But Romney can’t blast him in ads when he’s trying to join his side in the culture wars.

On “Hardball” today, former Mike Huckabee campaign manager Chip Saltsman advised Romney to be himself, to run on his record – as a family man, a business man, a governor, and the head of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. But I don’t think it’s that easy. Romney and Santorum both have big, lovely-looking families. That’s a draw. He tried to run on his record as a “job creator” and business maven at Bain Capital, but it turns out he was also a job destroyer and his Bain role is part of what makes him the face of the top 1 percent. Attention to Romney’s business record was actually disastrous for him.

Of course, his record as the Republican governor of a blue state, who paved the way in providing universal health insurance and accommodated Massachusetts liberalism on reproductive health, might really help him in a match with Obama, if he gets there. But he’s abandoned most of the positions that might attract independents and speak to his ability to get beyond the partisan gridlock everyone supposedly hates – a pitch that worked for a first-term senator from Illinois in 2008. Besides, that wouldn’t be much help during the primaries, anyway.

Worst of all, his Michigan roots were supposed to make that state’s primary a cakewalk. But unbelievably – or not – Santorum’s now ahead there, too. Romney bet wrong when he declared in a 2008 New York Times op-ed that the president should let the auto industries go bankrupt, and he’s paying for it now (despite ridiculous attempts to spin what Obama did as somehow derived from his advice.) And in a sentimental ad about his Detroit roots, it turns out Romney is riding in a Chrysler manufactured in Canada. The guy can’t fake authenticity no matter how hard he tries.

So all the former front-runner’s really got is his money to smear his opponents (I’m sorry I used the term “smear Santorum” on television tonight. It won’t happen again.) But his first barrage at Santorum won’t do much damage. In fact, Santorum released a surprisingly funny (normally funny and Santorum don’t mix) ad attacking “Rombo” for his well-funded mudslinging. It’s all in the video, below. I still think Romney is the candidate to beat, given his war chest and Santorum’s spare campaign, but he’s going to ride some tough road in his Canadian-manufactured Chrysler in the weeks to come.

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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.