Now, Henneberger is not a Republican. She’s a sorta-liberal, a veteran of the New York Times, Huffington Post, Slate and Politics Daily, who too often gives Republicans the benefit of the doubt, particularly when it comes to reproductive health issues. She emerged as a leading voice criticizing President Obama’s decision to require all employers, even religiously affiliated ones (though not churches) to provide contraception coverage in health insurance policies. You know my stand on that. But her questionable views on the politics of birth control got my attention a few weeks earlier, when she carried water for Rick Santorum and let him whine in an interview that Salon’s Irin Carmon had been unfair to him in her piece “Rick Santorum is coming for your birth control.”

Santorum told Henneberger: “The idea I’m coming after your birth control is absurd. I was making a statement about my moral beliefs, but I won’t impose them on anyone else in this case.” Henneberger sided with him against Carmon. “If that’s the cleanest shot you’ve got, you might want to wait until a better one comes along,” she wrote.

OK, let’s stipulate: Rick Santorum isn’t personally coming for your birth control — in the sense of going into your nightstand and taking out your pills, your condoms or anything else you have there to prevent pregnancy (not even the aspirin that his moneyman Foster Friess would like you to put between your knees, ladies). But Santorum has not only made clear he believes contraception is morally wrong, he has called it “an important public policy issue” in his now infamous conversation with caffeinatedthoughts.com. That’s where he said, “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is, I think, the dangers of contraception in this country,” calling it “not okay,” and “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” Excuse me if I don’t trust that he’ll keep his benighted views to himself.

Santorum also confirmed to ABC’s Jake Tapper that he opposes the Supreme Court decision in Griswold vs. Connecticut that made state contraception-bans unconstitutional.  That’s pretty far out there: Even conservative Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito backed Griswold in their confirmation hearings. But Santorum told Henneberger that he only opposed Griswold because he believed “states have the right to pass even dumb laws,” and he elaborated: “It could have been a law against buying shoestrings; that it was contraception has nothing to do with it.” Um, sure.

Now that Santorum is catching hell for his extremist views on matters of women’s health, he’s turning up the volume on his insistence that he wouldn’t ban birth control. “My position is birth control can and should be available,” he said in Ohio last week.  And again, Henneberger is suggesting Democrats are overreaching by portraying the former Pennsylvania senator as an anti-contraception crusader. She quotes Santorum’s “longtime media consultant and friend” John Brabender complaining,  “No one is making birth control a topic. It’s not an agenda that anyone’s running on. But it’s a distortion that works to [the other side’s] benefit to imply we’re for limiting access to birth control.”

Henneberger agrees. “When I looked back at a tape of what Republicans have been saying on the topic, what’s striking is how reluctant they are to go there.” She says the “contraception lobby” is firing up outrage to raise money. And again, she defends Santorum and notes that he only wants to defund Planned Parenthood – he’s even voted in the past for Title X family planning funds. (Actually, here’s what he said to Fox: “I support Title X, I guess it is, and have voted for contraception and although I don’t think it works, I think it’s harmful to women, I think it’s harmful to our society.”)

Where to begin?

First of all, Santorum’s website says he will “Repeal Clinton-era Title X family planning regulations, and will direct HHS to restore the separation of Title X family planning from abortion practices and restore a ban on referrals for abortion.”  But federal law already prohibits Title X from funding abortion. So I’m not sure what he’s repealing. Santorum is also pushing to make sure Planned Parenthood can’t get Title X funding, which Henneberger implies is no big interference with contraception access. The fact is, 575 Planned Parenthood clinics get those federal family planning funds – in some states and counties, it’s the only agency providing Title X services. So defunding Planned Parenthood because a separate arm of the organization provides abortion services hits Title X, and hard. Santorum’s plan would also keep Title X money out of health centers or hospitals or agencies that perform abortions, even when they’re medically necessary. So, sorry, John Brabender, your candidate is “for limiting access to birth control.” Severely, as Mitt Romney might say.

Santorum also supports various state “personhood” amendments, which would ban many forms of birth control, including the pill, IUD, the ring and the so-called morning after pill, because they can interfere with a fertilized egg implanting in the uterus. It’s true that some personhood proponents say the measures won’t ban the pill, while other personhood backers happily insist they will. The laws are written so broadly that no one knows exactly what they’ll do. That’s why former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, no fan of the “contraception lobby,” opposed his state’s personhood legislation. But Santorum and the entire GOP field support it (Romney, typically, has been unclear about exactly which version he backs).

So honestly, I find it stunning that anyone is arguing that it’s Democrats who are “putting focus” on this issue and then profiting from it, politically or financially.  President Obama followed the advice of the Institute of Medicine and required insurers to include no-cost contraception under the Affordable Care Act, because it’s best for women’s health and it also saves money. It was Republicans who politicized the issue, even after the president compromised with Catholic groups and took religious agencies out of the middle of the exchange. House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell lined up behind bills to repeal that requirement – Santorum and every GOP presidential candidate support their efforts — even though federal law mandates that insurance plans include all sorts of medical treatment. Democrats didn’t make them single out contraception as a mandated benefit.

Democrats also didn’t tell GOP Rep. Darrell Issa to hold a hearing on the issue – and to leave women off the opening panel entirely. Yes, Emily’s List is raising money on Issa’s blunder, with an ad featuring Rep. Carolyn Maloney asking Issa sternly “Where are the women?” It’s a good ad, but Issa and crew provided the visuals willingly.

Likewise, Democrats didn’t concoct the trend of requiring women seeking legal abortion to be harassed by undergoing an ultrasound first. The news that Virginia’s version of that law would mandate a creepy transvaginal ultrasound shocked the nation – and Wednesday Gov. Bob McDonnell says he won’t sign a bill mandating that forced penetration. That’s progress – and women’s rights groups and Democrats achieved it, by publicizing the Virginia GOP’s overreach.

Are Democrats and women’s groups capitalizing on the political opportunity these backward Republicans are providing? Absolutely, as well they should. But we should be clear: To say, “It’s Democrats who are putting focus on contraception” is a distortion. On “Hardball” today, Henneberger, to her credit, backed away from the language about the “contraception lobby” that she used in her Post piece, and said about Democrats and women’s groups, “it’s no outrage to raise money.” You can watch our conversation here:

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The man who calls contraception “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be” went from being a failed Pennsylvania senator, Mr. “Man on Dog,” to GOP presidential front-runner over the last month. Now he’s crusading against prenatal testing because he claims it encourages abortion (when in fact most prenatal testing helps women help babies who develop in utero health issues) and claiming President Obama’s policies will ultimately send Christians to the guillotine. (By the way, I apologize for harping on the way Protestants have persecuted Catholics in the U.S., because Santorum reminded me of some of the reason why, with his charge that mainline Protestant churches are a Satan-sponsored “shambles” that are “gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.”) He and Mitt Romney, who’s trying to match him outrage for outrage, have been chasing women voters away from the GOP in droves over the last couple of months.

Into that polarizing political climate came the news that Virginia Republicans want to go where no politician of any stripe belongs: up the vaginal canal and into the uteruses of pregnant women who are seeking an abortion. The bill already passed the state Senate, and clearing the House of Delegates seemed a mere formality, especially given that Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas already have ultrasound requirements. A mere formality, that is, until people began paying attention.

Now, for two days straight, the Virginia House of Delegates has postponed its vote on the bill. More than a thousand protesters lined walkways to the state Capitol to silently protest the bill on Monday, and their powerful statement seemed to still resonate on Tuesday. The bill is expected to pass eventually, but with every day, the national backlash against the measure helps its opponents’ chances. On MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” Tuesday Virginia delegate Kaye Kory urged the media to keep paying attention. Gov. Bob McDonnell, who supports the bill, is often mentioned as a GOP vice presidential nominee, and his office has emitted a few warning signs of alarm over the last couple of days. As far right as Republicans have lurched, it can’t be helpful for McDonnell to find his Virginia GOP accused of supporting state-sanctioned rape for forcing unwilling women to submit to vaginal penetration in order to exercise their legal right to an abortion.

Of course, the Virginia GOP still has its fervent defenders. CNN commentator Dana Loesch outdid herself (and that takes a lot) by suggesting that women had implicitly consented to such a procedure when they consented to vaginal penetration during sex. Wait. Let me make sure I’m not misinterpreting her. Here’s what she said: “Progressives are trying to say, that it’s rape and so on and so forth … They had no problem having similar to a trans-vaginal procedure when they engaged in the act that resulted in their pregnancy.” If that sounds like crazy talk – and it is — a Virginia Republican who supports the procedure said much the same thing, telling a Democratic colleague that women had already consented to being “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant,” according to Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick. I hope Virginia Republican women will ask their male partners whether they believe consenting to sex represents consenting to state-sponsored vaginal penetration as well. I know, it might be a mood-killer, but it’s a good thing to find out.

As Steve Kornacki observed this morning, Santorum may be compromising his own political future almost as much as he’s compromising women’s rights with his increasingly crackpot declarations. He’s also helping Virginians who oppose their state GOP’s extremism to get attention to their cause, while the Virginia GOP helps national Democrats sound alarms about Santorum’s lunacy.  It’s a win-win for proponents of women’s freedom. I keep pinching myself to make sure it’s not a political trick.

I talked about the GOP’s war on women’s rights with Virginia delegate Kaye Kory on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation”:

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“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.