Most Americans — including Catholics — believe birth control is morally acceptable, according to a new survey Tuesday.
While 89 percent of all respondents to a Gallup poll said they found contraception morally acceptable, 82 percent of Catholic respondents agreed; 8 percent of Americans and 15 percent of American Catholics said birth control is morally wrong.
Republicans and Democrats were pretty unified on the issue: 87 percent of GOP respondents approved of contraception, versus 90 percent of Democrats.
Controversy has swirled around the Obama administration’s proposed birth control mandate, which would require employers to cover contraception in their employees’ health insurance plans. The Catholic church, which opposes birth control, has sued the government over the requirement.
The poll shows that even as Catholic leaders oppose the Obama administration’s position on contraception, most Catholics don’t oppose contraception itself.
So are we do assume that all these “oppositions” aren’t from real people but from an institution, such as The Church, just telling us that Catholics and others are appalled? It seems to me that once again, things are as they have always been.
Back in the day, when there was much social upheaval, I knew many Catholics who just laughed and said what the father in the confessional doesn’t know, doesn’t hurt him. I was in a funny situation myself because my husband considered himself Catholic, attended mass every Sunday, but could not receive communion because he had been divorced. He did this before we were married and I suppose the marriage sealed the deal.
The birth control edict never affected me personally because of the way things were already. In the first place, I wouldn’t have married anyone who didn’t believe it was right and proper. I never knew any Catholics who paid any attention to that part of Church teaching. I didn’t live a life void of everything catholic either. My father was an ex and I married into a family of practicing catholics. We even had an ex seminarian in there for street cred. He had pretty much gone all the way through the program. It was nothing to go up to Baltimore for the weekend and practically run into a priest convention over at my in-laws. They liked hanging out there and using the pool.
I come from a world that believes not using birth control is immoral unless a couple can care and provide for each child brought onto this earth. I especially feel it is wrong to not advance the use of birth control in countries where poverty is rampant and children often die from hunger and disease. To me, nothing is more heart-breaking. I make no bones about how I feel.
So where do these 15% come from? I have no idea. I don’t think people have changed that much since my experiences. Whatever it is, we are being sold a bill of goods, methinks. People will do to suit themselvs, go into voting booth, pull the curtain, and vote for who they want to. How much pressure is being put on the faithful to disavow the President? That is part of the question I have never thought to ask. Obviously this most recent poll seriously disproves what I have been hearing on TV.
How much pressure is being put on the faithful to disavow the President?
Don’t expect to get an honest answer to that question. It might get some church into hot water with the IRS.
That 15% might come from the devoutly religious, the inexperienced, those who have trouble conceiving or the infertile who wish they were not, the paternalistic family unit, the wealthy who can afford nannies, etc.
I am in the 90% that thinks birth control is okay, but still count me in the “appalled” group. I don’t want the government infringing on the church’s first amendment rights, no matter how small the minority is that agrees with this particular religious teaching. The principle “majority rules, minority rights” should still hold in this country.
Beyond the emotion of the birth control mandate, the big issue is government control. Should the government have the power to arbitrarily carve out exceptions to the freedom of religion? I say no.
The other large issue is access to contraception. Adults are free to use contraception, but that does not mean that an individual is entitled to have it provided if (s)he cannot afford it.
@Kelly, I don’t think that the church, as an institution, has first amendment rights–just the people. When the church gets those kinda rights it had better be ready to cough up some income tax ….lots of it. No more tax exempt status.
The state lays out all sorts of specification for what insurance must provide. Didn’t we just have some sort of amendment that covers autism here in Virginia? A few years back some coverage was mandated by the General Assembly for breast cancer treatment. I am sure there are a million other examples I can’t think of. So why not birth control? Unwanted pregnancy is costing this nation a fortune, both in dollars and cents and in social cost.
Right now, the church gets its exception if it is operating as a church. The church owned corporations that run hospitals, publishing houses, colleges, schools, want to operate as churches, not as corporations, to slither out of paying. No. That’s not how it works. If you function as an employer, then you are an employer. What if they wanted to back out of FICA? Just claim a religious exemption.
Furthermore, lots of catholic institutions have been paying for contraception coverage all along without batting an eye. Now that this issue is center stage, the caterwauling begins.
I don’t want the church infringing on my rights if I am a paid employee who does NOT share their faith beliefs.
The church is not infringing upon your rights. The church is providing a PRIVATE benefit. Any association with said church and its “businesses” is purely voluntary.
Of course, the Church organizations can just drop all insurance…… oh. Wait. They are.
Thanks, Obamacare! I thought that we’d be allowed to keep “what we have.”
I think this brouhaha may cause more people to look at tax breaks that churches receive. Maybe it’s time to end them and put all these properties back on the tax roles just as any other business.
Why should a bunch of old, celibate white guys decide that the women who work in these institutions should be denied the right to birth control that other Americans have? If they don’t want those uppity women doing those thankless jobs, there’s a solution. They can get their butts out there and do the work themselves.
Maureen Dowd’s NY TImes article that I mentioned in another thread showed the disconnect between the Catholic Church hierarchy and its followers. The comment section was filled with remarks from those who could no longer follow and had fled the church. People took a look at the reality of their situations, our country’s situation, their family members’ situations and found that a bunch of controlling, old men weren’t catholic enough.
That was an excellent opinion piece by Maureen Dowd. It sort of said it all.
I find it interesting that because of the topic at hand that a ‘group’ should not have a 1A right to speech (or religion) when those same people were screaming that a group of people we’re kicked off the stairs of the General Assembly.
As my kids are learning. One of these things does not look like the other…..
Groups have 1A rights. Deal with it. You can disagree with it. You can dislike it. That is the LAW.
Now, having said that. Women or men that work for the church in a secular environment have a PRIVATE contract with that employer. That employer may require work on the Sabbath or not. They may require you to wear a hat and say “Thank you for choosing McDonalds, can I help you?”. They may require you to bathe. Whatever. The person employed CHOOSES to work there and they can choose to leave at any time that they don’t think the deal is beneficial.
I may not like that my employer is a marxist, communist, socialist sympathizer. But, if the commute works for me. The benefits are great and the pay is acceptable. Well life teaches you to suck it up, buttercup.
FOr the record – my employer is not. Actually the carry of firearms is authorized. 😉 And I get free snacks. =) =) =)
I support y’all in that I think that birth control is a persons personal choice. But I also think with that personal choice comes the responsibility of paying for it on their own dime.
marin, good point. but I objected to individuals being hauled away. I don’t think they, as a group, had a right to be there. Are we discussing free speech or are we discussing no infringement on the practice of religion?
I am not sure how far a group’s rights extend. I think there is more limit here than with the individual, mainly because groups are comprised of individuals. If one person in the group doesn’t agree, are we back to majority rule?
I believe the no birth control edict is that you won’t use it. Any further extension of that is rather artificial.
So which group am I dealing with? All catholics? The catholic heirarchy? The Pope? So all these people can practice their religion freely. Ok. Then what. I don’t happen to believe they can weasel out of paying for benefits by saying it is against their religion, any more than I think that a Christian Scientist organization can not provide for medicine.
As for paying for it on your own dime…personally, I agree with you. However, and this is a big however, there are a lot of women who become pregnant because they cannot afford to use birth control as it is supposed to be used. i can play hard ball and say not on my dime or I can be sensible and look at how much unwanted pregnancy is costing the taxpayers in the country.
Again, this goes back to what you are talking about…suck it up and get over it. You can’t change the human condition. Contraception has become very much a part of the health care provision. We need to just make it available and be done with it. It is just another way to bring the cost of entitlements under control.
I’m surprised it’s not 10/10. I don’t know a single person who believes there is a problem with birth control. But I don’t want to pay for YOUR birth control. OH….THAT’S a different problem!
I don’t know a single person personally, that I have talked to about it.
You obviously don’t believe in the pay me now or pay me later gotcha, do you? that’s one of the reasons your taxes keep going up.
Might as well just cut it off at the pass and hand out the birth control. I would rather hand it out than pay for it later. But that’s just me. I tend to be practical like that.
As for paying for MY birth control. That ship has sailed, but I always paid for my own, thank you very much.
In Notre Dame vs. the “US”, complaintants specifically state that this is not a case about religous freedom nor about whether people have a right to abortion or contraception. The government retains the right to make these services more widely avaialable – so take that off the Table. However, those rights do not authorize the government to then compell ND to violate its own conscience to provide, pay for or facilitate those same services through its own self-financed self- insured (indemnified ) insurance programs. ND underwrites its own insurance program. The issue here is that the government has violated the Affordable Care Act and its accompanying Obama E.O, the legislative history, ERISA, Weldon Act, all kinds of Pprocedures Act requirements and frankly a refusal by this Administration to exempt the an institution wholly owned by the Catholic Church as a sufficiently religious organization.
@Blue, then the church needs to stop functioning as an employer if it doesn’t want to play be employer rules.
An alternative would be to just give the female employers the money to do with as they see fit. I would agree to that fi they want to play hard ball. Of course, that doesn’t provide for permanent sterilization if that is what that person chooses to do. I would have to insist on vasectomies and tubal ligations being part of the health care package.
You can count me in as one of the 10%. The Catholic Church has this right, even if its members appear to have lost their way. As my Mother taught me as a young lad, just because everyone does it, that does not make it right. It appears that I now live in a time that has lost all sense of decency, where people are enslaved to their gonads. As to Maureen Dowd’s drivel, The Anchoress responds: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/theanchoress/2012/05/21/pelosis-failure-leads-dowd-to-cuomo-again/
I don’t think I am an indecent person because I chose to have children on my time table rather than on nature’s time table. I also don’t consider myself a slave to my gonads.
Rick, I ask you this respectfully, and I do appreciate your honesty here, but do you realize how offensive that sounds to a person like me and many of our contributors?
I am glad you said it though and I really didn’t mean for that question to come across as sdmonishment. I guess I haven’t ever really talked to someone with your belief system and I have been kicking around many years.
I am not sure who this woman is but I don’t think a good response is just spearing Maureen Dowd. Perhaps in my liberal protestantism (I would call it mainstream) I just don’t get the banter but I didn’t really see any dispute from the anchoress as to where Dowd was wrong. Now many as insider church chat, ok. I understand that perhaps outsiders won’t get it. However, I am not a full outsider.
As a young lass, my mother drilled the same thing into my head…she told me she didn’t care about what everyone else was doing, she was just concerned about what *I* was doing. If I heard that once, I heard it 1000 times growing up. Obviously, you and I walked away with some pretty different ideas on right and wrong.
Americans may view birth control as okay, but only 41% identify themselves as pro-choice according to a recent Gallup poll. This is surprising to me — I always thought pro-choice was the majority.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/154838/Pro-Choice-Americans-Record-Low.aspx
Last I heard it was about 50-50. I saw the same thing you just saw, Kelly. it will be interesting to see if those numbers become the standard. I actually suspect an anomoly.
This just in Pokie, you pay for NOT having birth control!
@Moon-howler
Yes they can, and can stop being an employer, a school, a social net, a hospital, a food bank, a counseling service, a woman’s rescue service, a mini FEMA, an adoption agency, a third world infrastructure investor, a renter, and, as noted, an independent insuror among other things. And, apparantly, they can do this or be the first major institution to succumb to the Administration’s truly outrageous assumption of powers not granted to them by the Constitution or any law (see above). Indeed they can do this if they are also not willing to accept the Obamacare mandate to provide birth control as a new and dangerous social policy tool (to keep the long term cost of unwanted children down (as in the Chinese or Nazi race based systems). Believe me there are cheaper historical ways to keep the cost of welfare and welfare pregnancy down. But the real cost here is IMHO to the cost of freedom, to society and to the future of our freedoms. That slippery slope cost is is higher – much higher than the public cost of unwanted pregnancy
If that is what they choose to do, they can have at it.
I don’t know what the church will do with a bunch of unsused universities and hospitals. Maybe they will sell them.
I find it strange that no one seems to worry about Elena’s 1A rights when she has to sit through all the Christian prayers when she goes to a BOSC meeting. Is that different because she is a Jew?
Many people, including many catholic people don’t feel that not having to pay for or use contraception is a 1A right. In fact, let me go on record and suggest that I think it is absurd to try to get out of providing something like contraception by using the religion trap door. No one says anyone has to take contraception. Now THAT would be an infringement on rights.
Did you honestly just say that providing birth control is a new and dangerous social policy? 🙄 Title x has been around as policy since the Nixon administration. It’s hardly a new concept.
I would expect someone who doesn’t want to prevent unwanted pregnancy to never ever again utter one word about paying taxes that go to medicaid, EI, food stamps, ecducation of illegal immigrants, schips, or any federal, state or local program that takes care of kids from conception to age 18. I will leave prison off the list. Does that describe you? You want to pay taxes to those areas? I don’t but I do it because that is my contribution to the human race. I would like to cut costs a little though. silly me.
What do you think of all those little children around the world living in rifrigerator boxes and fighting their siblings for scraps of food. I wonder what religion they are? I wonder what would happen if America went in and taught those moms how to not have baby after baby after baby?
What century are we in Moon? I think people who force others to bear children have “lost their way” actually.
Blue,
You do realize that you have lost what any shred of crediblity you were clinging to don’t you?
Family planning services have nothing to do with Nazism or forced abortions by the Chinese. You really sound silly, petty, ignorant, and hysterical.
Ok, Ok I get it you are just pulling my chain. Wow, you really had me going there – sorry. The idea that the US is somehow now obligated to provide free birth control to the third world or to every American, much less a Federal requirement with financial penalties if the Church and Synogoges don’t hand out condoms to its parishners and students. Geez. Societies that have come to that conclusion in the past did not have or permit churches or synogoges.
All sorts of organizations provide contraception information world wide. i was going to suggest that the church do it. How unrealistic is that. Imagine. Every child a wanted child.
providing it is not forcing it, I hope this clarification helps you Blue.
I find it amusing that (illegal) drugs and Native Americans may be the ruination of ObamaCare and the birth control mandate. Sort of how a gun in a school will also topple HCR.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/228761-dem-law-may-be-downfall-of-mandate
“The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) has been mentioned in nearly all of the more than 30 lawsuits pending against President Obama’s administration over the mandate. One, filed by the University of Notre Dame on Monday, cited RFRA’s protections in the first paragraph.”
“Because of the law, courts now have to apply certain standards to federal actions that might inadvertently infringe on religious liberty. In one sense, laws under scrutiny must aim to achieve a “compelling” government interest. In another sense, they must be designed in a way that burdens religion as little as possible.”
Blue, that’s some funny stuff. Was a treat to read.
“@Blue, then the church needs to stop functioning as an employer if it doesn’t want to play be employer rules.”
I would counter that women need to stop ovulating then to unburden the taxpayer. See how that won’t work??
Do church institutions have to withhold/pay funds for social security or medicaid? How is this any different? If they’re operating as an employer, they should abide by the law.
Birth control generally is a woman’s responsibility. I’m assuming we’re adults and know the anatomical differences between the sexes. Women need to be able to control what happens to their bodies and having birth control available usually ensures that control. (We don’t need prostate exams, but our insurance provides for you guys to have them.) If you disagree, have the ‘nads to say that you think you have any business telling any woman whether she should bear children. It would be the equivalent of my telling any of you guys that you as an individual should be snipped.
Censored, it’s a losing battle. Brith control is about sex but it also about other reproductive needs that happen to occur because women have different organs then men. That may come as a surprise to some, but BC isn’t just about doin’ the “nasty” 😉
I just think that in the 21st century, we are having this argument is astounding!
Elena, my sister used them as a teenager to regulate her erratic periods. I think she was too naive to realize that she could have had a lot of fun as well! 😉
Did you see this article Censored? Its an op ed by Dionne, pretty good, here is a little exerpt.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/many-catholic-bishops-resist-a-fight-with-the-obama-administration/2012/05/23/gJQAJIeClU_story.html?hpid=z12
The headlines this week were about lawsuits brought by 43 Catholic organizations, including 13 dioceses, to overturn regulations issued by the Obama administration that require insurance plans to cover contraception under the new health-care law. But the other side of this news was also significant: The vast majority of the nation’s 195 dioceses did not go to court.
@Elena
Hee hee, Elena, you beat me to it. I was about to link it. Yes, there seems to be trouble in paradise.
The real problem with all this is employers’ involvement in medical insurance. As I suggested in a thread a few months ago, employer-provided plans should be replaced by individual medical plans like those in the automobile insurance industry. Employers would simply provide a non-taxable subsidy to employees who could then choose the plan with the coverage they desire/afford. If the employee chooses not to purchase insurance, the federal government could tax the subsidy at a very high rate to defray the cost of hospital stays for the uninsured.
How do you get around volume pricing? How do you ensure that all plans don’t bounce people out for pre-existing conditions?
Any way you cut it, you have govt intrusion.
@Moon-howler
I’m really glad that abortion was illegal in 1962 and my mother was a faithful Catholic since I was an unwanted child.
Are you THAT old? Geez!!
Plenty of people had illegal ones.
I guess if it had happened, you wouldn’t be on the blog….so I am glad also.
“Are you THAT old? Geez!!”
Thanks Moon, that makes feel ALL better about refusing to turn 50 last week.
Did I forget to put a wink there? Happy belated birthday. When you get to be MY age, everyone is young. I actually thought you were kidding.
@Moon-howler
No offense intended. If it is the anatomical word that offends, you may replace it with lusts, passions, or even appetites. My statement was a general one, not pointed at any one person, an observation on what I am seeing in society, such as this post on contraception. Yes I do find its practice indecent, that is to say immoral. That it is widely practiced does not make it right. If that offends then it cannot be helped. I prefer not to offend, but I will hold to my convictions. I believe contraception hurts all of us; but then so does divorce, pornography, and abortion, other scourges we have carried into the 21st century.
@Rick, I believe not using contraception hurts mankind and children. I am a firm believer in every child a wanted child.
At what point do we over populate? When that happens nature or man comes along and provides the great incentive in the form of disease, war, plague etc.
While I don’t believe that divorce, pornography or abortion are new–all have been around for centuries. I never argue the right or wrongness of abortion. It is a personal matter. I expect we probably wouldn’t agree on what is or is not pornography. I don’t usually touch that one without knowing exactly what we are talking about. To you, the statue of David might be pornography. I just don’t know.
Divorce can be harmful. However, I don’t think it is necessarily wrong. Again, why are people divorcing? Usually the divorce part isn’t what’s wrong. Divorce is usually the result of something else being wrong. Right now anyone can get a divorce if they are willing to lay out the right kind of money….they can just get their marriage annulled. My husband refused to do that. He said it was the pinnacle of hypocrisy. I agree with him but it wasn’t my decision.
That brings us to contraception. You know I think having unlimited children unless you can afford to provide for them all (and I mean well provide for them–Kennedy style) is immoral. I have never talked to my diametric opposite. I am curious. Why do you think the practice of using contraception is indecent? No, you don’t offend me. I just think your opinion is bizarre and I am curious why you feel that way. How do you feel contraception hurts us all?
ooops I meant to put in a caveat….I had nothing to do with my husband’s first marriage circling the drain. I didn’t even know him when he lived with his first wife.
@Moon-howler
A thoughtful response MH that deserves a full reply. However my son is getting married in the morning, so it may be a few days 🙂