Doctor Science at Obsidian Wings takes a closer look at the recent study by Robert Jones and Danie Cox. The study found that, nationally, American Catholics are surprisingly accepting of gays. That's not in question. But when you break down the study in two states, Michigan and California, you find that the approval rates are not far off the approval rates of non-Catholics in those states. Catholics respond to the local culture around them as well as to their universal Catholic values:
In other words, all the discussion about what these results show about American Catholics is meaningless. The most you can say is that Catholics don't seem different from the non-Catholics they live among — they are, on these issues, part of their culture. That is only interesting if your null hypothesis is that religion is necessarily significant — which isn't a null hypothesis.
The Dish 