One of the maddening things about the creationists is that they are rarely forthright about their agenda. Euphimisms like "teach the controversy" and "fairness" abound.
This leads to a lot of support that would not exist were their true agenda to be placed front-and-center. Amanda points out, in an excellent post on the pregnancy-as-punishment anti-abortion right, how this also applies to the abortion debate (an aside: why is evolution a 'controversy', but abortion a 'debate'? Does that mean anything?):
Liberals make the whole thing worse by being obtuse about how the anti-choice movement has a lot more going on than some abstract "abortion is icky" thing. People don't camp out at clinics or hang out at the hospital where a white woman of reproductive age in a vegetative state is about to have her feeding tube pulled without giving her parents grandchildren first unless they have a lot more going on than a sort of touch and go relationship with the definition of "human life". They don't have meltdowns in the Supreme Court building and have to be hauled away while lawyers and judges go over the finer points of the difference between this abortion and that, depending on which way the fetus's feet are facing. They don't get hysterical at the idea that there's a fraction of a fraction of a chance that taking the pill could mean that a fertilized egg might be sloughed off that possibly wouldn't have otherwise, but most likely would since a good half do. The levels of hysteria in the anti-choice movement are such that something else besides just concern about "life" is going on, and that article is a good description of the racist anxiety, gender anxiety, and sexual anxiety that's underlying the whole movement.
Every so often, the social conservatives reveal what they're really 'thinking' (e.g., the Wedge Document), and they are truly terrifying.
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And the mainstrem scientists are also deceptive.
What many of them really want, as finally exposed by Dicky Dawkins, is to push an atheist agenda in our schools, while at the same time banning religion...even in private schools...as "intellectual child abuse" (Dawkins' own words.)
Of course, in so doing he is going beyond anything science is capable of and delving in to philosphy, but at least have the integrity to admit it.
So, like Amanda you assume that the belief that innocent lives are at stake is not enough to motivate action, but an un-stated racism *is*?
Ahh, so that explains the Catholic Dr. Miller, and the Pentecostal Dr. Bakker, and the Affiliation of Christian Geologists...
Tell us, Diana, what meds do you use for your pain? Because stupid like this has to hurt.