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 is always 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":
Liberals may think that conservatives support abstinence education because they believe it will reduce teen pregnancy, when the truth is that stopping teen pregnancy is at best a minor consideration for conservatives. If there's going to be any discussion of sex in school at all, they believe it ought to express the categorical moral position that sex is vile and dirty and sinful, until you do it with your spouse, at which point it becomes beautiful and godly (you'll forgive a bit of caricature). The fact that abstinence-only education is far less effective at reducing teen pregnancy than comprehensive sex-ed isn't something they're pleased about, but it doesn't change their conviction about the moral value that ought to be expressed.
The Dish 