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Graphing the (well-justified) slide in trust of clergy

Christa Brown explains why this is a self-protective adaptation.

Personally, I think it is good that people are beginning to view clergy with a greater measure of skepticism. That sort of skepticism may serve to make kids safer.

And note that the skepticism is rising among both Protestants and Catholics. That too is good. Maybe it is, in part, a sign that people are beginning to understand that clergy sex abuse is not just a Catholic problem. After all, the honesty and ethics rating for clergy has now dropped even lower than it was in 2002, the year that most consider to have been the peak of the Catholic clergy sex abuse crisis. Yet, the public’s perception of clergy has continued to slide even further downward . . . perhaps because the slide now affects all clergy.

Read the entire entry here.

Evening Poll: '`Very dangerous' Obam's approval rating

"Very dangerous" Barak Obama is still a popular cuss:

Fewer health reform option assumptions: More clarity

Data analyst Nate Silver dissects the badly flawed new Washington Post/ABC News poll and finds that both the public and the polls demand clarity:

From my vantage point, what the poll "proves", if anything, is that specificity will be helpful to the Democrats. They should either insist on the public option or remove it -- but keeping their options open may be doing little more than confusing the public. And the pollsters.

Most Italians reject the Pope's dismissive view of condoms

A majority of Italians disagreed with the Pope's stand against using condoms to prevent AIDS, revealed a poll published in the newspaper La Repubblica:

The poll said that 52.3 per cent were "absolutely against" the Pope's view - which overshadowed his trip to Africa last week - that condoms are not the answer to the Aids epidemic and on the contrary only "aggravate" it by encouraging sexual promiscuity. A further 21.2 per cent in the poll, conducted by Demos & Pi, said they were "fairly" opposed to the Pope's position, making a total of 73.5 per cent.

News of this poll of nearly 1,700 Italians questioned in the six days immediately following the pope's airborne remarks comes on the heels of two polls finding that the French are losing confidence in the Pope, possibly for similar reasons.

Neither post-facto revision of the Pope's remarks nor any Italian equivalent of conservative pushback against scientific and medical criticism of the Pope's stand were enough to turn the tide of public opinion in his favor. Italians have no trouble balancing such practical concerns with their religion, according to the London Times:

Ilvo Diamanti, a leading sociologist, said that Italians generally looked to the Catholic Church as a "moral compass", especially in "difficult times." This was not the case however when positions taken by the Church or the Vatican were seen as "different from the common consensus or the practical experiences of daily life"

The Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire criticized the French government for "presuming" to lecture Pope Benedict XVI on AIDS and condoms, and the Archbishop of Genoa railed that the pontiff had been unjustly "mocked and insulted" on the same issue by critics. All without distracting most of the Italian people from applying sound, practical judgment to a life and death issue of daily life.

French losing confidence in the Pope?

Le Parisien daily found 57 percent of respondents to a poll conducted Wednesday and Thursday in heavily Catholic France have a negative opinion of the Pope Benedict XVI, as opposed to last September, when it was 25 percent.

The same poll of 1,012 adults found that 23 percent have a positive opinion, according to the Associated Press, down from 53 percent six months ago (the rest expressed no opinion).

The cause of the Pope's rising negatives was not clear from poll reports, although the Pontiff has had some PR difficulties of late.

Abandoning the culture wars

Frink writes that "Values voters" ditch the culture wars. He says:

The culture wars lost the election, post-election polling tells us; the politics of the common good won.

Less than 20% of the "values voters" support the culture war's narrow, anti-abortion/anti-gay agenda, according to a Nov. 5-7 poll by Public Religion Research.

Instead a majority of both evangelicals and Catholics support a broad public-interest agenda which includes "fighting poverty, protecting the environment and ending the war in Iraq."

Read the rest here.