Hope I Didn't Scare You

Dennis Prager has a column about doomsday scenarios.  He maintains when it comes to false, foolish predictions of impending disaster, the left is worse than the religious right.  The media (he says) love to laugh at the Rapture that didn't happen last weekend, but ignore the silly claims the left makes about global warming, and older scares like widespread heterosexual AIDS and mass starvation.

Of course, this is a false equivalency (which even Prager halfway admits).  Looking at the evidence and saying here's a serious threat doesn't mean you're always right, but at least you're in the arena of rational debate.  Claiming if we don't shape up Thor will throw thunderbolts at us is simply a different thing.

Furthermore, Prager is blind to conservative doomsday scenarios--he accepts them or at least believes they're serious concerns.  Both right and left regularly claim if we don't do what they say disaster will ensue.  But Prager can't see how saying society will fall apart if we allow same-sex marriage is comparable to other scares. And let's not even get into the right's record on science except to say they're at least as good as the left at using it for political ends.