Hence, a woman who says she believes that each woman should have the right to decide whether to carry a fetus to term, and then chooses in her own personal situation is really a closet conservative, because, obviously, she doesn’t believe in abortion.

Someone who says that they believe that sex is wonderful, natural, and a part of life, and that respect for one’s partner(s), openness and honesty, and satisfaction are far more important than a marriage license, but who encourages their child to wait until they are older, more mature, and ready for sex is really a closet conservative who believes in abstinence.

It’s the idiocy that cannot imagine someone who feels that divorce should be legal and available to all and still chooses to stay married (even, one assumes, if one’s marriage is happy.) After all, why would anyone support something for anyone unless they want to use it themselves?

And on and on. Look at the standard attack on gay marriage that if everyone married someone of the same sex, there would be no children (a fallacy, to be sure), which only becomes an issue even in principle if legalizing gay marriage turned everyone gay.

It honestly never seems to occur to these people that there can actually be someone who really believes that there is not one right answer to each question that has to apply universally to all, and that anyone could possibly choose one thing while fully supporting someone else in choosing another if that other is more appropriate to them.

Everything is dualistic, and absurdly so. If sex within marriage is good, it naturally follows that sex outside it must be bad. If straight marriage is good, gay marriage is bad. If Christianity is good, Buddhism must be bad. And so on.

That’s also what he’s doing with splitting the evangelicals into “intense” and regular. Well, No True Evangelical would fail to be intensely religious, so all these other kids having sex before the non-evangelicals do aren’t really evangelicals! Our little world, which had been knocked off its axis, spins without wobbling again!

Am I missing something here? Is the writer conceding that abstinence only education doesn’t work? If so, and even though he might lament that fact, then does he still support such education rather than a broader agenda including discussions of pregnancy and disease prevention? Unless I’m missing something he’s basically saying that the difference between evangelicals of all stripes and everyone else is statistically insignificant (16.2 or 16.8 months is a drop in the hat for a lifetime).

He does acknowledge it, in passing. But doesn’t dwell on it, because acknowledging it would give aid and comfort to the enemy, a.k.a. those who want to cut off that sweet, sweet federal funding for abstinence-only education in favor of programs that actually work.

In addition, notice what he got you to do there? The 16.2 and 16.8 don’t represent all stripes of evangelicals vs. everyone else; they represent regular evangelicals vs. intense evangelicals. He didn’t give a numerical figure for non-evangelical Protestants, just “midway through the 16th year.”

The article goes on to convolute a whole lot of other discussions. The hoot for me was the influencing of a variety of behaviors. For instance, a recent study suggested that anti-smoking ads actually makes the idea of trying out smoking more appealing to kids (as the kids seek some way to rebel and instinctively see the ads as scare tactics thereby questioning the honesty of the campaigns - just like other drug war ads). Indeed, the results of these campaigns can be dramatic shifts in behavior over the short term, however over the long run the campaigns inevitably falter. “Just Say No” affects really young kids, but by the time they are teenagers that campaign has been proven to be ineffective (and costly). The abstinence only campaigns are just showing similar results in all groups.

What are we to make of this? That human behavior is consistent and rather than fight it, we should teach people how to be responsible, as safe as possible, and give them honest discussion and facts; not convoluted propaganda like Gersen’s article.

Pretty much. It’s back to the old No True Scotsman argument. Socially conservative values aren’t a disaster, because all the people who crash and burn while preaching them were really closet liberals. All the people who endorse liberal values and tolerance without crashing and burning are closet conservatives.

Of course, it also gets extremely close to admitting the cherished belief that liberals engage in behaviors that conservatives think are de facto immoral and self-destructive simply because they’re immoral and self-destructive. In the cases where a conservative does something along the same lines and doesn’t get retroactively expunged from the conservative roster, the explanation for their behavior is that they only took action after a great deal of thought and soul-searching, after all other options had been exhausted. It’s okay that they did it, because they had a very good reason and didn’t take it lightly, unlike all those other people who did it because it’s Tuesday.

Casual divorce? First of all, if there’s such a thing as “casual divorce,” why would anyone, including college-educated Americans, assume that it actually *would* serve the long-term interests of children? Second of all, what is casual divorce, and why does he seem to assume that once it was a trend? What is he *talking* about?!

Ironically, the reason I didn’t have sex as a teenager was that I lived in a hellhole of misogynistic religious conservatives, and preferred a dildo. So I do think fundies can prevent OTHER people from having sex.

He can take that and shove it up his ass. Which is not exclusive to the left either, if the behavior of the Catholic priesthood or the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang are any indication.

So the “nominal evangelicals” have sex at 16.2 years, while the “real” evangelicals have sex at, what, 16.8 or 16.9 years assuming we take that sneaky “nearly 17″ at face value?

Which means that regular church-going can delay your child having sex by six months at best. Whoo-hoo! They really are better than us!