As birth control flap goes on, who benefits most? Santorum? Obama?

The controversy over President Obama’s order on contraception and religious institutions is not going away as a political issue.

The two sides seem to be hardening their positions. The divide between many American Roman Catholics and their bishops remains. And it’s raising questions over who benefits most in the run-up to the presidential election.

Is it Rick Santorum, who seems to edge out his main GOP rivals on the issue – thrice-married Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, whose record on the issue as governor of Massachusetts has opened him to criticism from hard-line social conservatives?

"It's not about contraception," Mr. Santorum said at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday. "It's about economic liberty, it's about freedom of speech, it's about freedom of religion, it's about government control of your lives and it's got to stop."

Or is it President Obama who’s benefiting most?

In this coming week’s issue of Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan (who describes himself as conservative and a Catholic) suggests that “this could be the moment when the culture-war tide finally turns and the social wedge issues long deployed so effectively by the Republican right begin to come back and bite them.”

“The more Machiavellian observer might even suspect this is actually an improved bait and switch by Obama to more firmly identify the religious right with opposition to contraception, its weakest issue by far, and to shore up support among independent women and his more liberal base,” he writes. “I’ve found by observing this president closely for years that what often seem like short-term tactical blunders turn out in the long run to be strategically shrewd. And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it.”

No one can know for sure if that’s the case.

But a new poll out over the weekend finds “strong support from Catholics for the solution to the birth control policy the White House announced on Friday, indicating that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Congressional Republicans who oppose the requirement for birth control coverage are significantly out of step with rank-and-file Catholic voters.”

The poll of American Catholics, conducted Friday night by the Public Policy Polling organization, finds that 57 percent of Catholic voters surveyed support Mr. Obama’s policy, including 59 percent of Catholic women. A majority also opposes congressional attempts to reverse the policy.

1 | 2

Next