Two-thirds of American adults believe employers who have religious objections to contraception should be required to cover birth control as part of their employees’ insurance plan, according to a new Pew Research Center survey about recent controversies pitting claims of religious liberty and traditional morality against civil rights and non-discrimination policies.
The survey of more than 4,500 found Americans more closely divided over other hot-button topics. The public is split nearly evenly over whether businesses that provide wedding services such as catering or flowers should be able to refuse those services to same-sex couples if the business owner has religious objections to homosexuality. Forty-eight percent say they should, while 49 percent said they should be required to provide the same services to same-sex couples they provide to everyone else.
Just over half (51 percent) say transgender people should be allowed to use public restrooms of the gender with which they now identify, while 46 percent say they should be required to use the restroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate.
Researchers said the widespread support for requiring employers to cover birth control in health insurance plans may in part reflect that few Americans think using contraceptives is morally objectionable.
More than nine-in-10 adults think using birth control is either morally acceptable (36 percent) or not a moral issue at all (57 percent) while 4 percent say using contraception is morally wrong.
More than 60 percent of Americans believe same-sex behavior is either morally acceptable or not a moral issue, while about a third (35 percent) believe it is morally wrong.
A large majority of Americans (87 percent) say they personally know someone who is a gay or lesbian, while just three in 10 know someone who is transgender. People who know a transgender person are more likely to say that transgender people should be allowed to use the bathroom of their choice (60 percent), while others who do not know a transgender person are more closely divided as to whether transgender people should be allowed to use the restrooms of their gender identity (47 percent).