In his email to members last night, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins continued to crow about the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, claiming that “an FRC-commissioned poll [found] that 53% of voters (including 50% of women!) disapproved of the idea that employers’ should have to pay for workers’ sexual decisions.”
“So if there is a war, it’s on the facts,” he concluded.
Indeed.
As it turns out, the FRC poll that Perkins cites, which was taken in December of last year, got its results by simply lying to respondents about the content of the contraception insurance mandate.
The pollsters asked respondents whether they supported or opposed the “mandate which requires that all private healthcare plans, including both employer based health plans and individual market health plans, cover preventative care services for women, which includes all FDA approved contraceptives, including drugs that can destroy a human embryo, and sterilization services without a direct cost to the patient.”
In reality, none of the contraceptives covered under the HHS mandate “destroy a human embryo” — even if Hobby Lobby’s “sincerely held religious beliefs” hold otherwise.
As the Public Religion Research Institute found, when you poll people about the contraception coverage mandate without lying to them, a comfortable majority support it.
