via commenter CV at Mark Shea's:
Celling Out: Bioethics and the Culture of Cool
Excerpt (emphasis added)
A buddy of mine from college, one of the few with whom I still maintain regular contact, is convinced that I misplaced my brain somewhere over the course of the last eleven years... I'm religious—a Christian, to be more precise—which automatically makes my perspectives questionable as far as my agnostic friend is concerned. Exacerbating matters is the extent to which my views place me squarely within a "conservative" political framework and thus, in my friend's estimation, a position of ignorance, bigotry, and superstition.... Fortunately for my ego, I eventually came to realize that such intransigence really has very little to do with me personally; rather, it's part of a much larger phenomenon with which those of us attempting to safeguard human life must learn to deal. To state the matter as simply as possible, what I have discovered about my friend is that when it comes to bioethical issues, he's much more concerned with the associations of particular beliefs than the beliefs themselves. For him, embryonic stem-cell research is justifiable—even perhaps praiseworthy—not because logic has led him to this conclusion but in order to align himself with one particular cultural community over and against another. In short, my friend—a devotee of The Daily Show and NPR, a subscriber to The New Yorker, Adbusters, and The Financial Times, and a pretty big fan of both Al Franken and Michael Moore—wants to be thought of as an urbane and intelligent person and so has chosen for himself the political opinions that he believes further this reputation.
YES. For too many people, logic has nothing to do with it. They live in Maureen Dowd's world, a world where grown-up people still live by the rules of the middle-school cafeteria: I think this way because the cool kids think this way.
