Totally Called It

I'd say I nailed it, but that sound like a bit of a double entendre. In any case, Red Cardigan--Mrs Erin Manning--has a post up concerning a recent Gallup poll which found that 82% of Catholics (and 89% of Americans) think that there is nothing wrong with contraception. She notes that 77% of the Catholics polled are (not surprisingly) non-practicing:

So, 82% of American Catholics are dissenters on the matter of birth control. Which might sound worse than it is, if you overlook the other important statistic here...which is that 77% of American Catholics don't even bother to drag their buttocks out of bed each Sunday to go to Mass, and thus are already most of the time (objectively) in a state of grave sin. You know, the kind that can send you to Hell under the right conditions.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting pretty darned tired of the media including the 77% in their groups of "Catholics" when they ask questions about hot-button issues, such as whether "Catholics" approve of birth control or abortion or gay "marriage," and so on.

So why can I file this under "I totally celled it?" Because a few months ago, when the media and the Obama Administration was trumpeting about how only 2% of Catholics do not use contraception (a flat-out false assertion even based on the data from the study used), I suggested that it was actually closer to 10-20% (by which I meant, more-or less, that somewhere in this range agreed with the Church teaching, though not necessarily all who agreed actually practiced). From the second footnote of my post "Draconian Strictures":

I suspect that the number of American Catholics who agree with (and practice) the Church teaching is closer to 10-20% of all Catholics--see, for example, pages 92 and 152 of this report--and that's including both practicing and non-practicing Catholics as "Catholics." And at 10%, this is a population of perhaps 7-8 million people, all of whom are getting along just fine with this "draconian" stricture. This is a body of people approximately equal in size to, say, the combined Jewish and Buddhist populations of the USA, or (alternatively) of the entire United Methodist Church in America, and the religious beliefs of at the very least this body of Catholics is under direct assault by the HHS mandate.

For whatever it's worth. I do think, though, that these questions about percentages in agreement or not in agreement are a bit of a red-herring. There are a fairly substantial number of people who are being asked to violate their consciences for something which does not in any way further or protect the public good. To prevent the government from doing such a thing seems to me to be the very reason for the First Amendment and the religious freedoms which it engenders. I also agree with Mr Matthew Archbold when he says that it is a shame that so many Catholics do think that contraception is morally acceptable. There is as always much work to be done in catechizing (and even evangelizing) our own.