Kevin asked about sex-ed and the war on science today. Here's my answer.
UPDATE: I added and changed some things on this post until 9:22 AM.
When explaining what we mean when we say the Republicans are waging a war on science, or answering conservatives who deny it's so, it's best not to engage in blither-blather. In an attempt at responding to the following lines from a conservative commentator, for example--
There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a "war on science."
....For the most part, these accusations are a political ploy — actually an attempt to shut down political debate. Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled "anti-science." Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as "theological" and thus illegitimate.
--Kevin managed to type three long sentences without being clear:
The disingenuousness here is breathtaking. Yes, liberals and conservatives have different views about sex education and stem cells, but those aren't even close to being the core issues in the liberal critique of the Republican war on science. The core issues, rather, are global warming denialism; creationism and intelligent design; the Gingrich-era shutdown of OTA; the promotion of phony cost-benefit analysis; and politically motivated lying about things like Plan B, breast cancer links to abortion, and condoms and STDs. Gerson surely knows this, but chooses to ignore all these genuine issues because his goal isn't to talk about science at all.
One better way to respond is to say, "The contraceptive based sex-ed programs work- they get less teens to have pre-marital sex and less teens to get pregnant; the Republicans promote the abstinence-based programs, though, which everyone knows don't work by now. That's a war on science. That's denying data just because you want a different outcome," and so on with analogous arguments about other "war on science" issues.
Another way to look at it, and I guess a way that's more for us to answer to ourselves to help us understand the conservative voters (rather than some of the conservative activists)- and when you start to realize how much dumber or at least uneducated and irrational the conservatives are than us, you really start to wonder about whether explanations like this have a lot more importance than you've been allowing- is this: "The conservatives hear the words 'sex ed.' To them, those words mean 'education about sex'- from a normative view, or a scientific view, or whatever. They don't necessarily see it as a social program to help teens' lives so that they don't make bad mistakes and suffer from social problems. They see it as the opportunity for schools to teach teens whatever it is appropriate for teens to know (or think) about sex. So if older people are revolted by any hint of condoning teenagers' having sex, then accordng to conservatives, the sex ed class should teach the teens only abstinence, end of story."
Specific to the sex-ed debate, I think part of the solution is for us as liberals to communicate better that we do not want to "teach teens to have sex." I think too often conservatives read comments that are something like what I wrote above, and they think it means we want to do that (which is a reaction we should work to prevent). Also, I think too often liberals hear of that conservative reaction, and their reaction is too close to being something like, "Well, so what if kids want to have sex," or "Oh well, we can't do anything about it anyway" (and that also is a reaction we should work to prevent).
For one thing, despite all the dogma to the contrary, I don't think anyone really doesn't care if her 17-year old daughter runs off to have sex with Thag, the 36-year-old Harley Davidson-riding gang-member. Not only does it make sense that people should feel that way about Thag, but also, we shouldn't push standards that refuse to acknowledge views we hold ourselves and can't seem to abandon- like the one about Thag- without first examining those views and figuring out whether they fit somewhere into the ideology or policy we've been tinkering with and expounding.
So this is why people feel the way they do about Thag, I think:
I guess I can't really be the arbiter for anybody of whether it's okay or not for them to have one-night-stands with strangers. But that's the morally normative point of view on relationships- let's look just at what's safe & practical. I think we all can agree that it's a safer life to live- emotionally, economically, and health-wise- to seek out relationships with people who really care about you, and who are similar to you in terms of power and experience. Then, they care about whether something hurts you (what the consequences of it for you are), and they are less likely and able to take advantage of you and basically less likely to be working contrary to your interests when you are letting them get so close to you. Teenagers are especially vulnerable, because they are especially inexperienced at life. Therefore, it makes sense to encourage your teenager to limit his/her relationships to those that are monogamous, those that are about caring for the other person, those that do not proceed to sex quickly (because otherwise, they are more likely to be just about sex, despite what your teen may believe) and those that are with another similarly-aged teenager from a similar economic background. But when we do this, we are not necessarily saying, "This is the way you have to be your whole life, and if do not things that way for your whole life, you are stupid or there is something wrong with you." We are just saying, at least, "This is the way you should do things for now." When a person is older (25+), they are better able to defend themselves, and have more experience to decide on their own whether to have one-night-stands with the stupid person they just met, or the person who just verbally abused them (but looked cute) in the bar. No matter what libertarian dogma people have about sex, I think they all can agree with this.
So I think it is entirely appropriate for us to, in agreement with conservatives, dissaude our teenagers from having sex with Thag or I guess Thagetta (and as you can see, I'm not saying that you didn't already realize this in some way, just that you may not have admitted it to yourself and other liberals), and I think we should communicate this to the conservatives. Once they see that we are not trying to promote teenagers' harming themselves (really, keeping the conservatives from making our kids more likely to do things that will harm them is the same thing we think we are doing by promoting realistic sex-ed) then they will be less likely to misunderstand out view on sex-ed and to respond to our arguments with epithets instead of a real discussion.