Conservatives are going wildly off-message when it comes to the fight over contraception.
February 21, 2012
For many pundits and politicians on the Right, the visceral impulse to shame women for being in control of their own sexuality is so overwhelming that they appear to be totally incapable of maintaining their usual message discipline. That's going to cost them the fight over contraception.
The polling on the Obama administration's recent “accommodation” with the Catholic bishops reveals an important trend. When the issue is framed as a battle over “religious liberty” for institutions associated with the church, Americans are deeply divided. When it's about access to contraception, they're not – overwhelming majorities are in favor of mandating that religiously affiliated employers provide their workers with insurance that covers birth control.
The numbers don't lie. A Pew poll that offered little in the way of explanation of the new rule asked those who had heard about it (62 percent of respondents) whether “religiously affiliated institutions that object to the use of contraceptives should be given an exemption from the rule,” and found that a plurality sided with the bishops (by a margin of 48-44).
But a CBS/ New York Times Poll found that when some background was offered, and the question was worded a bit differently so that the emphasis was on contraception (“Should religious employers be required to cover contraception?”), the results were very different. Both self-identified Catholics and the larger public favored the rule by a healthy 2-1 margin.
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