University Daily Kansan, April 29, 1985
NATION AND WORLD
Page 12.
U.S. view toward sex is liberal, survey says
By United Press International
WASHINGTON - Americans have a more conservative attitude toward childbearing and divorce but not toward other family and sexual issues, according to a public opinion researcher.
The Development and Population Task Force of the Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus sponsored the briefing, called "U.S. Population and Military Perspective." The group Catholics For a Free Choice prepared it.
"On most of these family issues, support for liberal positions has grown substantially over the last 20 years and now a solid majority of Americans favor liberal policies," said Tom W. Smith, research associate at the National Opinion Research Center and director of the center's longitudinal study on American attitudes on social issues.
Support for premarital sex, unmarried couples living together, abortion and dissemination of birth control information has increased significantly over the last 20 years, Smith told a Capitol Hill briefing for members of Congress and their staffs. He said liberal viewpoints on sexual and reproductive practices had not reversed.
"INDEED." SMITH said, "support is higher for those positions than it was in the early 70s or 80s, and in the 90s you have a much public backs the liberal positions."
"A standard corollary of the belief in the resurgence of family values and practices is the belief that this reversal is rooted in religious conservatism," Smith said.
"The notion is that Catholics, following the lead of the pope, and Protestants, following the Rev Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority have swung the country back to traditional family values," he said.
Public opinion surveys do not support either view, he said.
HE SAID SURVEYS going back to 1972 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago showed small differences on reproductive attitudes and behaviors of Catholics and Protestants. Catholics tended to be more liberal than Protestants.
In the research center's 1983 survey, for example, 66 percent of Protestants and 85.5 percent of Catholics favored giving birth control information to teen-agers; 66 percent of Protestants and 80 percent of the Catholics said premarital sex was not always wrong, and 85 percent of the Protestants and 88 percent of the Catholics said they favored sex education in public schools.
Smith said the center's survey also showed that less than 10 percent of Catholics supported their church's position on abortion.
"NOR DOES IT appear that politicians must follow the preaching of these Catholic and fundamentalist religious leaders in order to win their followers' votes," Smith said.
Analyses of voting patterns show that, on average, candidates can expect to win more votes than they will lose on either the issue of legal abortion or that of allowing government health clinics to supply birth control devices to teen-agers without parental approval, he said.
LOCAL BAROMETERS OF BOREDOM CONTINUE TO ACQUIRE TERRITORY
An unnecessary verbal exchange between two groups outside a beer bar in Merriam, Kansas recently resulted in a few seconds of fistulciffs and the consequent death of a 6'3", 220-pound high school athlete. While different versions of the events preceding this fateful encounter presently exist, everyone concedes that the dispute was, according to the April 20th Kansas City Times, "the kind of regrettable...(incident) that can unravel...outside any bar".
(Paid Advertisement)
Even as Lawrence's City Manager, City Commissioners, Kansas University administrators, and Chamber of Commerce officials paint beautiful pictures of the possible, they ignore those local barometers of boredom who continue to drag race, vandalize, abuse, fight, and otherwise terrorize with impunity at Hillcrest, Southern Hills, extended outdoor fraternal assemblages, and 14th and Ohio Streets. Most Lawrentians don't seem to realize that this governmental and administrative retreat from duty increases the possibility that something comparably "regrettable" could "unravel" here.
William Dann
2702 W. 24th St. Terr.
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