Posted on 02/18/2015 5:43:21 PM PST by Gamecock
Roman Catholic bishops released a draft document this week calling for the church to welcome gays, unmarried couples and people who have divorced. The document is proving to be highly controversial among conservative Catholics, and the official English translation already has had some of the welcoming tone revised out of it. But several public-opinion polls suggest that Catholics in many countries are ready to accept such change — more ready than members of many other religions.
In the U.S, the General Social Survey, which is conducted by the research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, has been asking about divorce and gay rights since the early 1970s, and about cohabitation since 1994 (typically at least every two years). At my request, GSS director Tom W. Smith sent data, broken down by religion, for half a dozen questions. In their answers, American Catholics consistently have shown themselves to be more tolerant of divorce, gay rights and unmarried cohabitation than have American Protestants and Americans overall — especially in recent years.
In all but one of the 14 GSS polls over the last quarter century, more Catholics than Protestants said divorce should be easier to get by law. In every survey since 1973, more Catholics than Protestants said gays should be allowed to speak publicly, teach and have books they wrote available in libraries. (If those questions don’t sound like they go very far by today’s standards, keep in mind that the Vatican isn’t going all that far, either, and that when these questions were asked in 1973, more than a third of Americans didn’t agree — half, in the case of teaching.) Also in each survey, more Catholics than Protestants said gay sex was “not wrong at all.” And all four times the GSS asked whether a couple living together unmarried was acceptable, more Catholics than Protestants said it was.
A similar pattern emerges in recent international surveys. We didn’t have data broken down by religion in individual countries, so instead I examined how attitudes within countries corresponded with the percentage of their population that is Catholic. In general, the higher a share of a country’s residents are Catholic, the higher percentage of residents express tolerance toward divorce and towards gays. The effect isn’t huge, but it’s consistent.
I examined the responses to three survey questions by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. One asked if respondents believe homosexuality is morally acceptable. Another asked if homosexuality is a way of life that should be accepted by society. A third asked if divorce is morally acceptable. For each question, I compared the percentage who said homosexuality or divorce was acceptable with the percentage of the population that is Catholic, for those countries for which I could find the data. And in each case, the correlation between the Catholic population percentage and the percentage who accepted divorce or homosexuality was positive (with R ranging from 0.39 to 0.54).
Methodology note: I used the most recent United Nations religion data. For countries missing from the U.N. data set, I used data from Catholic-hierarchy.org. For 17 countries, I had data from both sources, which I used to make sure the two sources were consistent. They were very closely correlated — R=0.96 — but the Catholic-hierarchy.org estimate of the percentage of the population that is Catholic was, on average, 10 percent (not percentage points) higher than the U.N.’s estimate for the same country, so I adjusted the Catholic-hierarchy.org estimates downward accordingly. When I was done, I had estimates for the Catholic population share for between 34 and 43 countries for each of the three Pew questions.
Seems like the Pope really is Roman Catholic after all!
surprise surprise....
No surprises here ping
ping
All those dang numbers are WAY too high across the board!
The one’s I’ve observed directly are typically “conservative {uhhhhh} but progressive”.
And we ain’t seen nothin yet.
No wonder Western Civilization is committing suicide: it's being given razor blades by the media.
It is also in the voting.
The democrats almost always gets the support of the majority of Catholic voters, and they never get the vote of the majority of Protestant voters.
Homosexuality is s sin.. but gay priests are fine.. if the are "practicing" or having sex with the altar boys we will see it is covered up and the 'priest " "reassigned
Divorce is a sin..BUT we will have a "discussion" with god and determine if you were ever really married" hows that ??
Catholic FReepers seem pretty solid as do our Jewish FRiends.
They seem to be the minority.
Maybe Catholics should try giving up liberalism for Lent!
Indeed.
Then again there should have been an Evangelical break down.
If some on FR are to be believed there should have been 80,000 different surveys of Protestants. LOL.
Could Lent be moved to October and November, then?
Liberals should not be allowed to hide behind the term “progressive” when they are anything but. The so called “progressives” keep insisting on using the failed policies of the past, how is that “progressive”?
For example, "Is divorce morally permissible?"
Depends. In some cases, separation may be morally *required* (e.g., husband sexually abuses children), and divorce may be practically required in order to force the husband to support his kids. So, yeah, in cases like that, divorce may be morally permissible.
Divorce *and remarriage* is not morally permissible if the first marriage is valid and the second marriage is not sexually continent, but the pollster didn't ask that question.
That's Catholic teaching at least. One should *expect* Catholics to agree with Catholic teaching, not some pollster's confused caricature of it. (Not to imply that those expectations will be met, mind you.)
Who here really thinks that a homosexual person should be prohibited from teaching, e.g., chemistry, physics, math, or any other topic not related to sexual morality at the university level, provided that he's a professional at what he does, and does not attempt to proselytize?
Obviously at least in America today, you will be subject to legal action if you attempt to act on that conviction in your hiring decisions.
Get rid of the liberal Catholics and the ones left still dwarf any protestant faith. LOL.
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