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I noticed yesterday that Republicans ran away from further votes on the issue of birth control. It was pretty obvious that their position, which started as a paean to religious freedom but started to sound suspiciously like conservatives just didn’t believe in birth control – certainly not as a preventive health measure, was hurting them with the public. But we didn’t know how much until a new poll secured the data.
The poll, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for the progressive groups EMILYs List and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, showed that Democrats hold a wide lead over Republicans on issues like access to birth control (56-18), women’s health (46-28) and abortion (42-31). In addition, voters strongly opposed the Blunt amendment, which would have allowed employers to deny preventive health care coverage as part of their insurance plans if they raised a moral objection, by a 60-40 margin. But more importantly, 48% of respondents said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate if they supported the Blunt amendment. That’s a significant number that puts metrics to the belief that the debate hurt Republicans generally.
What’s more, GQRR ran an experiment revealing that the birth control issue actually moves numbers:
Access to birth control has the potential to impact actual races. As a starting point, in this battleground, a generic Republican leads a generic Democrat by 5 points (47 percent to 42 percent). In a split experiment, we tested a generic informed match-up between a Democrat and a Republican with half the sample; in this exercise, the Democrat continues to trail by 6 points (47 percent to 53 percent). The other split received the same information with accompanying information about birth control. In this match up, the candidates are tied at 48 percent.
On the politics, it does appear that Republicans are right to back off – their position on birth control was severely damaging their party brand. On the policy, it’s worth noting that there is active litigation on the rule promulgated by the Health and Human Services Department that mandates contraception coverage as part of the preventive health services menu, free without a co-pay, with some exemptions and accommodations for religiously affiliated institutions. Conservative and religious groups have filed eight separate lawsuits protesting the rule. The rule is also part of the broader Affordable Care Act, which the Supreme Court could rule unconstitutional later this year. The conservative groups suing over the birth control rule do not have precedent on their side:
To win that argument, they will need to clear a major legal hurdle: A landmark 1990 decision in a case called Employment Division v. Smith, in which the Supreme Court found that if a law is “neutral and generally applicable” — meaning that it is not specifically targeted against any religious group — individuals must comply with it even when doing so imposes a burden on their free exercise of religion.
Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Antonin Scalia — a conservative justice known for his strong identification with the Catholic Church — found that to allow otherwise “would be courting anarchy” by making “the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
Nonetheless, with the politicians running screaming the courts are probably the last area of potential relief for those opposed to this rule. And they don’t look likely to succeed there.
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Every claim of “religious liberty” and “war on religion” needs to be accompanied by the utter hypocrisy of those making the claim.
Not a single person claiming Obama is engaged in a “war on religion” would call for freeing Warren Jeffs because he is imprisoned in a liberal war on religion, a war on religion that was started by that radical leftist President Lincoln, that forced Mitt Romney’s great grandfather to flee the USA, the land of religious liberty, to Mexico to avoid imprisonment for practicing his religious faith, and that dictated church doctrine to the Mormon church.
This isn’t an imagined “war on religion”, but a long history of an actual “war on a religion: Mormonism” in the USA.
If just one of the Sunday taking heads would ask about the war on Mormons in response to claims of a “war on religion” or on the denial of Warren Jeffs religious liberty, I’m sure the conservative blogosphere and the Republican Congressional spokesmen will explode with anger over any comparison between restricting women’s health care by Catholic/Christian religious doctrine and restricting Mormon marriage doctrine based on Catholic/Christian religious doctrine.
But such an explosion of anger would be very useful for advancing the debate over the conservative agenda which is constantly justified on moral value proposition. And if it immerses Mitt Romney in the middle of a “war on religion” controversy, all the better because either Republicans need to back off from their religious based attacks or the Republicans will fracture as their hypocrisy is paraded in the open.
I’m not sure all those zealots understand that “the pill” prevents a fertilized egg attaching to the uterus. If my hunch is correct and they do figure it out, then we’ll probably have yet one more bizarre episode in the War on Women.
BTW, today is International Women’s Day, finally achieved in 1977. Celebrate it well.
Not sure I understand your point. Are you advocating freeing Jeffs bc he was jailed owing to his religious practices?
Ain’t nothing to celebrate. :-(
War on women, war on browns, war on blacks, war on poor, war on LGBT.
Are there any more groups the Rs can find to p/o?
So ask yourself, why are Rs going out of their way to p/o such a large % of voters.
Something is actually bad for republicans? Hard to get my head around that. Somehow, in some cryptic, backhanded way, it has to work out that the birth control issue is actually…. Good For Republicans!
You are getting at my last Q in 6 in different language. IOW, what is Rs’ 11-dimension chess?
Actually I think hormonal contraceptives usually prevent ovulation and/or fertilization.
Aha, it’s been awhile, but that’s my memory too.
This Man’s Pill.
It has, hasn’t it? :-)
It works both ways. LINK.
Uh, DDay, I’d revise your text a bit.
No one thinks either of these groups of ass clowns is “progressive.” They may CALL themselves progressive, and they may fool some people who haven’t been paying attention for the last, oh, four years, but no way in hell are they “progressive.”
Don’t give them something they don’t deserve.
This is straight from the No Shit Sherlock file. But let them keep doubling down. Or start a war on puppies.
Funny how the Fox watchers swallered the shit about this issue being a conspiracy by Dems. Even better if it was they certainly jumped on the wagon and took control of driving it themselves.