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A Univision poll (pdf) of 12,000 Catholics in 12 countries found that big majorities reject the logic of Humanae Vitae:

The contraceptive question stands out to me. On other issues, there is a more equal division in the pews, or more support for the hierarchy’s position (two-thirds oppose civil marriage equality, for example), or huge differences between the developing and the developed world. But on contraception, massive majorities in Europe and Latin America and the US oppose the Vatican’s position.

And in some ways, contraception is the core issue, as Pope Paul VI recognized in his unilateral rejection of his own commission’s recommendation on the subject. If sex can be licit without procreation, the arguments shift tectonically on a whole host of other matters. Such a change would open the question of sex as purely expressive of love rather than instrumental for procreation, of whether gay sex can be licit, of pre-marital sex, of a whole universe of possibilities – and areas for moral thinking. That’s why Paul VI shut the debate down prematurely – he saw the potential consequences.

But he didn’t succeed and the hierarchy has ever since abjectly failed to make the case for its thirteenth century version of natural law. At some point, the church will have to stop preaching this or give up credibility in the Americas and Europe in favor of Africa and the Philippines, or remain resigned to promoting a core set of morals simply ignored by the vast majority of its members.

I think they should stop preaching this and begin thinking seriously about a new sexual ethic that is actually informed by science and by the experience of countless millions of lives. It’s also striking to me that the question of married priests – which Pope Benedict XVI dismissed as inconceivable (except when it meant snagging a few reactionary Anglicans) – so evenly divides the faithful.

It’s pretty close to 50-50. Unlike contraception, it requires no deeper shift in doctrine – and could well do more to revive the church in the West than any other single reform. It’s the lowest-hanging fruit for Francis to pluck, if he has a mind to. But check out the question of women priests as well. I would have expected a solid majority against, but in fact, the church is evenly divided on that as well: 45 – 51.

As for abortion, I agree with Morrissey, who thinks the top-line numbers are misleading:

[T]he striking figure here is the low number of Catholics who think abortion should be unrestricted. If, as the question suggests, abortion was restricted to only issues of the mother’s health and rape and incest, there may be considerable support for having just those limited options available as compared to the abortion-on-demand environment which currently dominates the US. Only 10% of American Catholics, and 20% of those in Europe, favor abortion on demand.

The questions of human sexuality are rightly deemed less grave than the termination of human life.

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He’s from the younger Latino generation but belongs to a party whose center of gravity is with the white elderly. Maybe that explains it. But let’s deconstruct his answer to the question: “Have you ever smoked pot?”:

“I’ll tell you why I never answer that question. If I tell you that I haven’t, you won’t believe me.”

‘Tis true. But if you told us you had, we’d believe you. And that is simply a function of the rank dishonesty in this debate. So why not challenge that dishonesty, simply tell the truth, grapple with the details of the argument, pro and con, and take a position informed by your own life and experience? That’s what elected representatives are supposed to do. So why are you refusing to do your job?

“And if I tell you that I did, then kids will look up to me and say, ‘well, I can smoke marijuana because look how he made it.’”

Well, duh. So – again – why the avoidance of the truth? Because you prefer propaganda to truth? Because your own life would illuminate one aspect of the debate? So for fuck’s sake, tell us if you did or didn’t. It’s not that hard. No one will be offended either way – and at least people will give you points for candor. After all, politicians have been asked that question regularly since Bill Clinton.

The last three presidents all smoked weed before they became president. And the truth is: smoking marijuana does not ruin the lives of the vast majority of those who smoke it. If you know that to be true (and it’s undeniable), why are you still dodging the question?

“I know I’m sounding like a 42-year-old dad, but here’s the problem. You can make mistakes at 17 that will be with you the rest of your life, OK? … People won’t get hired because of that stuff.”

But the only reason people don’t get hired is because of the Prohibition we’re discussing. So this is completely circular. As is completely obvious.

The one thing that has struck me most forcefully these past few months as the marijuana debate has finally really gone mainstream is how desperately unprepared the politicians are to grapple with it, and how transparently weak the arguments of the Prohibitionists are. Rubio just confirms what we already knew. He refuses to answer relevant questions about his own life, refuses to take a stand even on a clear ballot initiative in his home state, and reverts almost instinctively to a circular argument when forced into the open. He has essentially abdicated being an elected representative because his political interests – pandering to the white elderly – require him to sustain any number of untruths. I’m sorry, but I don’t have sympathy for him. Just contempt.

David Corn covers Paul’s fixation on Bill Clinton’s indiscretions:

On Meet the Press at the end of January, Paul accused Clinton of engaging in “predatory behavior” and taking “advantage of a girl that was 20 years old.” (Lewinsky was 22 years old, when she and Clinton hooked up.) And Paul griped, “the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this.” (Paul must have slept through much of the 1990s, for the media granted nonstop coverage to the affair and the subsequent investigation and impeachment.)

These were not random remarks; it seemed Paul was waging a one-man campaign to revive an old scandal. Afterward, he told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, “In my small town…we would in some ways socially shun somebody that had an inappropriate affair with someone’s daughter or with a babysitter or something like that.” Days later, Paul, during a C-SPAN interview, said that any Democrat who raised campaign money with Bill Clinton ought to return the donations because of Clinton’s dalliance with Lewinsky. In another interview, he called Clinton—who is scheduled to campaign later this month for Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Kentucky Democrat challenging GOP Senator Mitch McConnell—a repeat “sexual predator” and suggested that Hillary Clinton should return any campaign money gathered with Bill’s help.

Beinart’s take on what Rand is thinking:

Paul isn’t speaking to most Americans—he’s speaking to the Christian right.

Paul is presumably well aware that while economic conservatives loved his father, social conservatives did not. In the Iowa caucuses, for instance, Ron Paul won 28 percent among voters who said the deficit was their primary issue but only seven percent among those who said it was abortion.

For months now, Rand Paul has been trying to make inroads where his father did not. Last June, at a conference organized by former Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed, he put a new twist on his skepticism about foreign aid, arguing that America is funding Islamic regimes that oppress Christians. “There is a war on Christianity,” he insisted, “and your government, or more correctly, you, the taxpayer, are funding it.” Last October, he told students at the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University that “America is in a full-blown spiritual crisis.” And last week, he told the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage American Principles Project that “‘Libertarian’ … doesn’t mean ‘libertine’ … I don’t see libertarianism as, you can do whatever you want. There is a role for government, there’s a role for family, there’s a role for marriage, there’s a role for the protection of life.”

Paul’s effort to revive Lewinsky-gate is best seen as part of this effort.

Aaron Gilbreath reviews Robert Gordon’s Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, which offers insights into a groundbreaking Memphis studio:

[The book’s] absorbing scenes show the way original music gets made. Here, it’s often accidentally: musicians goofing around in the studio, tinkering with riffs they’d written or combinations of notes they find themselves drawn to. In this quiet way, Respect Yourself portrays the enigmatic workings of creativity — and the role of common, unplanned events — as with the way the chorus to Sam and Dave’s breakout hit “Hold On, I’m Comin’” resulted when Dave was sitting on the toilet, and Isaac Hayes kept telling him to hurry up and get back downstairs to the studio. The way Otis Redding came to Stax’s attention while working as a chauffeur for a visiting guitarist, and kept asking people at the session to let him sing. And how Rufus Thomas casually recorded his big hit “Walking the Dog” during a quick studio visit on the fly between church and Sunday dinner. Gordon wisely contrasts Stax’s loose “organic” approach with Motown’s assembly line, automaker approach. As Isaac Hayes put it, “Stax was down-to-earth, raw, very honest music.”

Reviewing the book in December, Elsa Dixler highlighted (NYT) what made Stax stand out from other labels:

As early as 1962, some of the qualities that made Stax unusual were apparent. The most important was the absence of racism in a Memphis that was still completely segregated. “Being treated like an equal human being . . . was really a phenomenon,” Al Bell, who later became the executive vice president of Stax, recalled. “The spirit that came from Jim and his sister Estelle Axton allowed all of us, black and white, to . . . come into the doors of Stax, where you had freedom, you had harmony, you had people working together.” An obvious symbol of that harmony was Booker T. and the MG’s, consisting of two black musicians and two white. Gordon makes clear how extraordinary this atmosphere was by following the stories of the effort to unionize Memphis’s mistreated sanitation workers and of the white flight that followed the city’s slow compliance with Brown v. Board of Education.

Claire Lundberg explores the ups and downs of the country’s state-subsidized university system. Among the downs:

[A]t France’s open-enrollment public universities, the dropout and failure rate after the first year is close to 50 percent. The most competitive majors, such as law and medicine, cull their student lists with more brutal testing. Future French doctors must pass a government-regulated subject test after their first year of college—a test for which the initial failure rate is 90 percent. Many students take the entire year a second time, but even these redoublants have an 80 percent failure rate. (The French minister of education is trying to implement reforms that redirect the weakest students into other professions after their first semester.)

People who want to be doctors or lawyers often retake the first year several times, in hopes of passage—each time, costing the government more money.

The Ministry of Education would like to limit the number of times these tests can be taken. In a way, this makes sense—the government is paying to train the doctors, they want to make the decisions about who will and won’t progress in the profession. But of course, there are other skills that go into being a doctor besides the ability to pass a government exam. The French system works beautifully if you’re extremely focused from a very early age, work well under pressure, and are great at taking tests. It works less well if you’re not sure at age 16 exactly what you might want to do with your life, or if your family members and peers aren’t already familiar with the system.

Dara Horn pours cold water on Bennett Muraskin’s theories about Jewish surnames:

[T]he immense attention paid to this article reveals the degree to which many American Jews are still fascinated to learn where they came from. Unfortunately, it also reveals how the members of a group so highly educated in other respects know so little about their own history that they will swallow any “fact” from the Jewish past that comes flitting across their screens. …

“Lieb means lion in Yiddish,” we are told. Actually, leyb means lion in Yiddish (with the vowel sound ey as in “hey”), while lib (the word that sounds like the German word lieb) is a verb form for “love”—as it is in German; this error requires an ignorance of two languages. We are told that Berliner means “husband of Berl,” despite the fact that Berl is a man’s name in Yiddish and Berliner is more recognizably derived from Berlin. We are told that Lieberman means “loverman”; it is actually a term of formal address, as in “dear sir.” We learn that Mendel is derived from Emanuel, when a rudimentary knowledge of Yiddish makes it clear that it is a diminutive of Menahem. There are more like this, but I needn’t bore you.

A hyper-realistic statue of a sleepwalking man in his underwear on display at Wellesley College has students demanding its removal, saying it serves as a trigger for victims of sexual assault:

Although the artwork would not likely be legally considered indecent, let alone obscene, student Zoe Magid is less interested in talking about it and more interested in removing it. She believes that, “while it may appear humorous, or thought provoking to some,” such qualities are invalidated by others’ readings of it. Magid asserts that the inanimate object is “a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for some members of our campus community.” So, she started a petition demanding the university stick Sleepwalker inside the museum, away from the public eye. 722 people, about one-third the school’s student population, have signed.

Charlotte Atler urges the Wellesley women to chill:

There’s something spoiled about our knee-jerk reaction to abolish anything that could be considered even remotely insensitive. The message is, “it’s possible that someone somewhere might feel momentarily bad because of this, so get rid of it right this second! And by the way, you’re an asshole if you don’t agree.”

Marcotte offers a qualified defense of the over-the-top reaction:

Chuck Schumer has a simple solution to Republicans’ professed concern that Obama can’t be trusted to enforce a new immigration reform law:

Appearing on “Meet the Press” Sunday, Schumer, the Democratic senator from New York, floated a new proposal designed to win Republican support for an immigration bill—a proposal designed specifically to address concerns that Boehner raised last week, when the Speaker esssentially declared that efforts to pass reform were at an impasse. At a press conference, Boehner indicated that his fellow House Republicans won’t support an immigration bill because they don’t trust President Obama to enforce it. Fine, Schumer said on Sunday—let’s postpone the new law’s effective date until 2017, when Obama isn’t president anymore.

Tobin tips his hat to Schumer for outsmarting the GOP:

[B]y giving in to Republicans on this point and putting off implementation of the law until after Obama leaves the White House, all Schumer has done is to expose something that was already obvious: Republicans won’t vote for an immigration reform bill under virtually any circumstances.

Boehner immediately rejected the proposal, saying it would leave no incentive for Obama to enforce current law for the remainder of his term. Kristol suggests that Republicans use Schumer’s own logic to kill reform:

So even Schumer is willing to have no legislation go into effect until 2017. In other words, the main sponsor of the Senate immigration bill, who has previously pretended immigration reform is urgently important, is acknowledging that in fact there is no urgency to act. But if nothing needs to go into effect until 2017, then Republicans have an even simpler solution: Do nothing. Don’t enact legislation until 2017.

John Dickerson doubts the GOP can pass a reform bill, simply because the forces working against it are too strong:

Here is a key point: The conservative activists and grassroots groups who can punish members who vote for a bad immigration bill are stronger than the forces that are pushing for passage of the immigration bill. This is the shorthand Republicans use to explain the political balance of power. “The Chamber [of Commerce] and downtown [lobbyists] want it,” says one GOP leadership aide, “but they’re not going to primary anyone.” Absent the clarifying force of an outside group putting a lot of money or enthusiasm behind a challenger, Republicans in individual districts don’t face pressure from minority voters. There are 108 majority-minority districts and Republicans only hold nine of them. Of the 24 House Republicans who represent a district where the Latino population is 25 percent or higher, only a handful are vulnerable and could therefore be affected by a bold move on this issue that would affect voter opinions.

Larison notes the gap between the GOP leadership and the rest of the party:

The House leaders are working on the assumption that passing an immigration bill is both desirable and beneficial to their party. Most of their party believes neither of these things, so they’re bound to be wary of anything that the leaders tell them in an attempt to sell them on what most of them regard as bad legislation. The difficulty that Boehner and his lieutenants have is not just that Republicans don’t trust Obama, but that most Republicans also don’t trust their own leaders on this issue, and with good reason.