Not breaking: Gallup poll shows everyone thinks birth control is 'morally acceptable'

This isn't really news (unless you're a clergyman in the Catholic Church or your name is Rick Santorum), but yet another poll, this time from Gallup, shows that pretty much everyone in America'including Catholics who are supposedly losing all their religious freedomz because of birth control'thinks birth control is totally a-okay.

This is just the latest in a series of polls showing that:

• most Americans have a favorable view of birth control;
• most Americans think all workers should have access to birth control, regardless of their employers' religious beliefs;
• most Americans, including Catholics, think employers should be required to provide health insurance that covers birth control;
• and most Americans support a federal requirement that private health insurers cover the full cost of birth control.

In other words, pretty much all Americans freakin' love birth control. They want everyone to have access to birth control. And they want insurers to pay for it. And they don't give a rat's ass what employers think of birth control'including Catholics, whose very faith is supposedly under attack.

That's bad news for Republicans, who thought that attacking the president for his birth control mandate would actually win them any support. And it's especially bad news for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who this week coordinated a massive lawsuit by more than 40 Catholic-affiliated institutions, like the University of Notre Dame, to try to stop the administration from implementing the new mandate.

This, of course, follows on the heels of months of whining and crying by the bishops about how the president is waging war on the Catholic Church and religion and the First Amendment and God himself. If women have affordable access to birth control, the bishops claim, the entire Catholic Church will be so driven to distraction that it will no longer be able to "live out the imperatives of our faith to serve, teach, heal, feed, and care for others." And if that sounds like the bishops have tried to take health care hostage by threatening to suspend all of its good, Jesus-y works, that's because that's exactly what the bishops have tried to do. Enforce our belief that women should not use birth control, since we can't make them listen to us, or we'll stop feeding the poor, healing the sick and caring for others.

But this poll shows what all the others before it have shown: no one cares what the bishops say about birth control. Everyone likes it, everyone wants it, and no one other than the same crooked organization that covers up for pedophiles has a problem with it.