I stumbled over a line in Mike Allen and Josh Gerstein’s Politico story on the battle over Souter’s replacement, that because Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was expected to be the first departure (she has pancreatic cancer), “the unofficial lists of potential nominees are topped by women.” It sounded a little bit like a problem, as if Obama would now have to start over, and assemble a white male list to replace Souter.

In fact, Obama’s list should continue to be topped by women, because there’s exactly one woman out of the nine Supreme Court justices. I’m sure the Politico boys didn’t really mean to confine us to the Ginsberg slot, but there’s such a reflexive sense that justice today is fulfilled by tokenism, when it comes to women and minorities – we’d never expect to find them well-represented, or God forbid, in the majority.

Except, of course, women have made up the majority in many leading law schools for a while now. I would never suggest that’s a reason to discriminate against men in Supreme Court choices; let’s just say no president has had a better choice of female picks than Obama does. (Poor George Bush seemed to think he had no qualified conservative women to choose from, after his selection of Harriet Miers bombed.) It would also be important to add a Latino to the bench, which is why so many people are suggesting Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who grew up in a Bronx housing project and is now on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Diane Wood, who clerked for Harry Blackmun, taught at the University of Chicago Law School and was a Clinton appointee to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, would be another great choice. There are plenty.

Republicans are allegedly gearing up for a battle over who replaces Souter. The Allen/Gerstein piece had this fairly hilarious quote from an anonymous “Republican source:” “The GOP obviously does not have much power in D.C. these days, but just like we helped ourselves by opposing the deficit-busting stimulus, opposing left-wing nominees like her is our path back to the majority.” Two noteworthy points there: It’s all about their “path back to power,” not what’s good for the country, and this person actually thinks the GOP helped itself by opposing the stimulus. The party’s approval rate is sinking and it already lost one senator — Arlen Spector — over its obstruction. If that’s the path back to power, Democrats will be in power for a long time.

Whatever the Republicans do, I think it’s clear that Obama’s oft-repeated commitment to diversity – in race, gender and life experience – points to his picking a woman this time around. I’m hoping the great Ruth Bader Ginsberg will be with us a long, long time, but she deserves a female colleague. At least one.

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.

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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.

Karl Rove heard echoes of Obama’s rhetoric too, and implicit optimism about the direction of the country, and cried foul.

“I was, frankly, offended by it,” Rove said on Fox News Monday. “I’m a huge fan of Clint Eastwood, I thought it was an extremely well-done ad, but it is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.”

Rove wasn’t the only Republican who tried to cast the Chrysler ad as essentially payback to the president for supporting the bailout that kept the domestic auto industry alive. Michelle Malkin tweeted her horror Sunday night: “Agh. WTH? Did I just see Clint Eastwood fronting an auto bailout ad???”

Now, Clint Eastwood is no Democrat – he voted for John McCain in 2008, has been a Republican for most of his life, and now describes himself as having “libertarian” leanings. It’s hard to imagine he’d lend his name to an openly and intentionally pro-Obama ad. Chrysler has denied any political motive behind the Eastwood ad.

The flap over the ad confirms the GOP’s serious branding problem: The problem for Rove and the rest of the GOP is that their party’s narrative has become relentlessly negative, pessimistic and uninspiring. They’ve left the language of optimism and resilience, higher ground and common ground, to the Democrats, and lately President Obama has grabbed every opportunity to employ that language.

Rove is essentially complaining that anyone using rhetoric of resilience and tenacity, or suggests “we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one” sounds like a gosh-darn … Democrat.  That’s good news for Democrats. There’s more good news in recent polls showing that Obama is winning back at least some white working-class voters with his feistier message of economic populism. The president’s approval/disapproval ratings have been dismal with whites who make less than $50,000, with his approval dropping into the low 30s and disapproval up in the mid-60s regularly over the last two years.

Now those numbers stand at 43-54, about where they were when Obama was elected. He may not carry that cohort, but holding the share he had in 2008 will make his reelection chances much better. There’s also good news with those same voters in some Rust Belt states, including Wisconsin, Ohio and, yes, Michigan, home of Chrysler.

Karl Rove is angry because he sees the numbers, too, and he’s got to explain them away with dark allusions to “Chicago politics.” But the fact is the president saved the auto industry at a time when Republicans, most notably Mitt Romney, urged him to let it die. If he gets credit for that unpopular decision, that’s because he deserves it.

And if Clint Eastwood sounds like a Democrat when he talks about American ingenuity and optimism, that’s because increasingly it’s Democrats who sound that way – and Republicans who don’t. Ronald Reagan co-opted buoyancy and hopefulness for a generation, painting Democrats from Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis through Al Gore and John Kerry (with a break for Bill Clinton) as Negative Nellies, whiners and complainers always finding fault with America.

Now it’s Republicans who bad-mouth the American people, warning that lax morals and laziness are behind the problems of the poor and working class (including whites), and who paint scary dystopic pictures of America under its Kenyan anti-colonialist socialist black president. Karl Rove’s hissy fit over the Chrysler ad underscores exactly how bleak his party’s vision has become.

I’ll be on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 p.m. ET to discuss Rove and the angry GOP.