As NewsBusters has been reporting, the perilously liberal media have been focusing a great deal of attention on contraception in order to assist President Obama's narrative that Republicans want to take away everyone's birth control.
Doing his part on MSNBC's Morning Joe Thursday was CNBC contributor Howard Dean who actually said with a straight face, "Very conservative women want their kids, their daughters taking birth control" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
HOWARD DEAN, CNBC CONTRIBUTOR: We did a focus group in 2008 when Obama was running, and we did it in western Pennsylvania with pro-Life women. And Obama had, I mean McCain had said something like we shouldn’t pay for, he was against paying for contraception but he was for paying for Viagra. So we, that comes out in this pro-Life focus group, and these pro-Life women go, “This guy is totally out of touch” because they all had teenage daughters, and whatever they thought about abortion and all that, they did not want their teenage daughters getting pregnant.
And people in America are very practical people across the political spectrum. Very conservative women want their kids, their daughters taking birth control.
Really? I would think most very conservative women want their teenage daughters to be celibate and likely believe giving them birth control is telling them it's okay to have sex.
A 2007 Associated Press/Ipsos poll provided some insight:
People decisively favor letting their public schools provide birth control to students, but they also voice misgivings that divide them along generational, income and racial lines, a poll showed.
Sixty-seven percent support giving contraceptives to students, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. About as many — 62% — said they believe providing birth control reduces the number of teenage pregnancies.
Let's look at some of the details (emphasis added):
Minorities, older and lower-earning people were likeliest to prefer requiring parental consent, while those favoring no restriction tended to be younger and from cities or suburbs. People who wanted schools to provide no birth control at all were likelier to be white and higher-income earners. [...]
Underlining the schisms over the issue, those saying sex education and birth control were better for reducing teen pregnancies outnumber people preferring morality and abstinence by a slim 51% to 46%.
Younger people were likelier to consider sex education and birth control the better way to limit teenage pregnancies, as were 64% of minorities and 47% of whites. Nearly seven in 10 white evangelicals opted for abstinence, along with about half of Catholics and Protestants.
In addition, 49% say providing teens with birth control would not encourage sexual intercourse and a virtually identical 46% said it would.
So, 46 percent of those surveyed preferred morality and abstinence with the same percentage saying giving kids birth control encourages sex.
Think very conservative women would have been in that group?
Yeah, I do too.
But that's not the narrative the White House wants, and CNBC's Dean did his part Thursday to further the misinformation.
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