Americans Are Becoming More Liberal

The Republicans take a flier on morals and family values.

Cultural warriors in the United States are turning to sharper words. The better the economy is doing, the more the attacks from conservatives focus on morals and family values. Surely there’s something that can be used against Obama!

Same sex marriage, abortion and moral decline — those were the subjects that could be trusted to arouse broad indignation in the past; liberals have long been attacked for being anti-religion. But people today can’t be counted on to go along with that.

Americans have become more liberal over the past few years and decades; especially younger Americans. In contrast to the 1990s, the image of the average family has changed. Forty-one percent of all mothers and more than 50 percent of those under 30 years of age are unmarried when their children are born.

Recent surveys show that about 50 percent of Americans approve of legalizing same sex marriage. That rises to 70 percent among those in the 18–34 age range. Last week, Washington became the seventh of the 50 U.S. states to permit same sex marriage, and Maryland is poised to do the same. On the other hand, opinions are more divergent when it comes to abortion, although only a minority favors a comprehensive ban.

And how do Republicans react to this trend? They campaign just as they did in the old days and have even revived contraception as a political issue. Just a brief reminder: Contraceptives have been legally available in the United States since 1965.

Back then, the Supreme Court overturned a Connecticut law banning all drugs and medical products used for contraceptive purposes. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health rights organization, nearly all women of childbearing age today use some form of birth control.

The 2012 edition of the contraception argument concerns who should or should not pay for it. As Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has emphasized, it’s not an insignificant point, with the pill costing around $600 per year.

Protests against the pill and condoms

Obama’s healthcare insurance reforms include coverage for contraception. Employers who provide health insurance are now required to cover those costs as well. The rules also apply to religious employers such as hospitals, but not to the churches themselves.

Conservative Protestant evangelicals, as well as all 181 Roman Catholic bishops, are protesting against the requirement, because they object to the use of any form of artificial birth control, including the pill and condoms. In so doing, Catholics reference papal encyclicals dating from 1930 and 1968.

Spokesman for the bishop’s conference, Richard Doerflinger, is demanding that employers be granted an exception from the law on the grounds of conscience. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, along with a number of his Republican colleagues, says employers must be granted an exception based on religious freedom, and three candidates for the presidency have since taken stances similar to those of the religious critics.

Aspirin instead of the pill

Candidate Rick Santorum, a father of seven, is also against the pill, which he recently claimed encourages irresponsible behavior. Santorum’s biggest campaign contributor, Foster Friess ($381,000 thus far), became the butt of jokes after saying that women used to use a Bayer aspirin held between the knees instead of the contraceptive pill and joked that it was a lot less expensive.

Historically, evangelicals (those who have undergone a conversion experience, take the Bible more or less literally and who desire to spread their beliefs with the conviction that they have been “saved” because of their relationship with Jesus Christ) have been the chief cultural warriors. Approximately one-fourth of U.S. voters consider themselves evangelicals.

Evangelicals originally included some who strongly believe in the separation of church and state, but since the early 1980s they’ve inclined increasingly toward the Republican Party.

But younger evangelicals tend not to favor such selective interpretations of scripture. Many point out that Jesus spoke often about the poor. The YouTube video “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” produced by 22-year-old Jefferson Bethke, has received some 20 million hits since it was posted on Jan. 20. Bethke concludes that Jesus didn’t command people to vote Republican.

Religious and demographic trends aren’t favorable for conservatives. Conservative activists are predominantly white and elderly and are slipping into minority status: 66 percent of voters born between 1978 and 2000 voted for Obama in 2008. African-Americans and those of Latino and Asian heritage make up 35 percent of voters, and their numbers are growing.

Christianity remains the dominant religion (three-fourths of Americans say they are Christians), but changes are also apparent here. Fifteen percent of those taking part in a Hartford Seminary survey claimed no religious affiliation whatsoever — nearly double the number giving that response in 1990.

Despite these social changes, cultural wars will continue to make headlines. Conservatives can count on the support of of a well-developed infrastructure of think tanks and organizations.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox [News] Network supports the Republicans, as evidenced by their reporting, and the rest of the media world loves events in which male “experts” wearing dark suits comment on matters of contraception and insurance coverage.

One would have to be a resident in some non-media world in order to miss the fact that such ridiculous talk bears absolutely no resemblance to reality.