{"id":8123,"date":"2006-08-04T15:34:47","date_gmt":"2006-08-04T19:34:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8123.html"},"modified":"2006-08-04T15:34:47","modified_gmt":"2006-08-04T19:34:47","slug":"theres-a-culture-war-in-america-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/theres-a-culture-war-in-america-right\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s a ‘culture war’ in America, right?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I follow culture-war issues fairly closely, but the Pew Research Center conducted a survey with an interesting perspective on the hot-button issues. As the researchers see it, there can’t be a “war” because there aren’t two distinct sides<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The so-called [tag]culture war[\/tag]s rending America over such issues as abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research may be overblown, based on a U.S. poll released on Thursday.<\/p>\n

“Despite talk of ‘culture wars’ and the high visibility of activist groups on both sides of the cultural divide, there has been no polarization of the public into liberal and conservative camps,” the Pew Research Center said, commenting on its poll of 2,003 American adults.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The point isn’t that the culture-war issues don’t matter or aren’t polarizing. Indeed, Pew found<\/a> the country split fairly evenly on nearly all the issues (stem-cell research, with broad support, was the exception).<\/p>\n

Instead, Pew emphasized the fact that there aren’t two stark ideological camps. The study looked at five prominent social issues — abortion rights, stem cell research, gay marriage, adoption of children by gay couples, and availability of the “morning-after” pill. Only 12% of poll respondents took the conservative position on all five issues, while 22% took a progressive approach to all five.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure if this is a sign of flexibility on the part of most Americans or ideological inconsistency. Either way, I would have expected a lot more than 12% of the population to take a hard line against those five issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I follow culture-war issues fairly closely, but the Pew Research Center conducted a survey with an interesting perspective on the hot-button issues. As the researchers see it, there can’t be a “war” because there aren’t two distinct sides. The so-called [tag]culture war[\/tag]s rending America over such issues as abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}