I can't hear you

In my post the other day about the evolution dust-ups I mentioned at the very end my feelings about how the two sides of the argument are so far apart they can't hear each other. It's true of course in any dispute that engages people on a deep and non-rational level. I came across a good example of what I'm talking about via Ed from the excellent Dispatches from the Culture Wars. The example features a quote from a user of the ARN Design Forum message/discussion board.

The writer (Douglas Bender) is responding to a question about so-called 'abstinence only' sex-education, and his response is fascinating. He says, essentially, that the risks to the souls of the individuals engaging in premarital or promiscuous sex are perhaps more important than the risks to their physical well-being (pregnancy, disease, etc.); therefore "one should not teach them ways to destroy or taint their souls in 'safety.'"

In other words, if you're going to go out and do something that my religion says will endanger your souls, boys and girls, you're going to have to risk your body and your future to do it. These people don't much care that their misbegotten anti-sex education concept is not effective at preventing pregnancy nor at slowing the spread of sexually transmitted disease -- nor even that it doesn't do much to reduce the numbers of young people who go out and have sex, with or without the appropriate knowledge. What they care about is that they don't appear to be placing the immortal souls of our youth in peril -- a peril in which only they believe.

And we try to argue with them saying that their programs aren't effective and that kids are going to do it anyway, and we trot out our statistics and our examples of lives shattered and bodies ruined, but they don't care. That's not the problem, in their world. They don't want a secular society in which the public health system and the public education system work to prevent and/or address the real-world consequences of (in this case) raging teen hormones. They want sinners to be punished -- even if the "sinners" don't subscribe to their particular set of beliefs.

The middle ground is going away fast. There is less room every day for reasonable people to disagree and discuss and try to resolve anything. And it doesn't help matters when we dismiss the increasingly militant christian right as merely stupid and uninformed.

Don't even get me started about gay marriage.