But you insist on treating this as a scientific issue, where well-meaning authorities have differences of opinion and conflicting interpretations of the facts.

What we have here is different, there is an ideological agenda behind the "scientific" debate. These people don't care what the data says, and they may even be perfectly aware it doesn't support their views. What they are interested in is building a constituency for purposes other than religion or science. This debate may have been initially social and cultural, at its core it is now economic and political. The ideological homogeneity of the creationist position is all the evidence we need of this.

This dynamic reflects other social and cultural issues with ideological implications, such as the homosexuality (and to a lesser extent, contraception) debate. Although individuals of all political persuasions may adopt Darwinist ideas, anti-evolutionary pseudoscience is restricted to only one side of the political spectrum. And the apologists for the pseudoscience, even when they disagree with it, are always ready to make excuses for it, and always ready to point out that "something else" is worse, that it is preferable, and therefore must be tolerated.