Who Speaks for American Catholics?
January 29, 2014 By Adam Lee
Last week during my interview on the Nick Givas Radio Show, the host, himself a conservative Catholic, asserted that the Obama administration has offended American Catholics by mandating that health insurance plans cover contraception, and now has a duty to placate them by making whatever legislative changes they demand. I only had time for a brief response to that, so I want to expand on it today.
Now, I’ll agree that the Catholic hierarchy – the Vatican, the U.S. bishops, the presidents of Catholic universities and other such religious institutions – have asserted that requiring employee health insurance plans to cover contraception is a violation of their religious freedom. (Note: I agree that they’ve claimed this. I don’t agree that it’s actually a violation of their First Amendment rights, for the obvious reason that the religious beliefs of an employer don’t confer a right to dictate his employees’ access to health care. But that’s a topic for another post.)
However, this argument deceptively conflates this small, unrepresentative group of men with the feelings of American Catholics in general. There are, at most, a few hundred or thousand men who control the church as an institution and who are the driving force behind these lawsuits (there’s a total of 441 active or retired bishops in the United States), whereas there are almost 70 million self-identified American Catholics. How does this far larger group of people feel about contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage and all the other modern advances that the bishops rage against?
We can start with this widely cited 2011 study from Guttmacher, which found that 98% of Catholic women have ever used a contraceptive method other than NFP, in defiance of the church’s decrees. Granted, this total would include any woman who’s ever had sex using a condom, even once. But that fact should offer the church little comfort: the same study found that, among women who are currently sexually active and not attempting to conceive, 87% of Catholics are using contraceptive methods other than NFP. (If you’re wondering how Catholic apologists try to deal with this fact, consider this response, which huffed that the survey was of women aged between 15 and 44, “so it could say nothing about women between 45 and 100″. Something tells me that birth control isn’t quite as much of a concern for women between 45 and 100.)
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2014/01/who-speaks-for-american-catholics/