"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with
which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more
idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are
at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient
times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound
up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only
unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is
theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer
any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes
evil.” Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Trappist Priest, Thomas
Merton - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton
This clip is so W-esque it sends chills up my spine. But, as Chait notes, it's an almost perfect example of how fundamentalist thinking is simply incompatible with empirical reason:
This is not just about sex. What defines the current GOP is what I called in "The Conservative Soul" the fundamentalist psyche. This means an attachment to unchanging dogmas not just on religion, but on everything. So abstinence education must work because abstinence works (regardless of the data). And government borrowing isalways wrong, even in an acute depression where aggregate demand has collapsed. And taxes must never be raised on anyone or anything, even though revenues are at 50 year lows and it's politically impossible to balance the budget by spending cuts alone. At the most recent Republican debate, every single candidate said they would turn down a debt deal with the Democrats that included a 10 - 1 spending cuts to tax increase ratio. That's insane in political and economic terms.
But if you're really a fundamentalist religious grouping more than a political party, it all makes sense. Paul Waldman says that Perry's "stance on sex education is about 95 percent moral and 5 percent practical":
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