What I mean is, there's this appetite for building up these oversimplified pictures of the people "on thebother side" - if they're agin you on one thing they have to be agin you on all the others. Being anti-abortion has to mean being pro-war and pro-death and against welfare benefits and so forth; or from the other side, an equivalent package of heterogeous views.

The idea being, I suppose, then you can relax because, since there is no point of contact, no shared values, there can be no real challenge involved.

But life isn't as simple as that. Oh yes, there are always going to be people who fit snugly into any stereotype we assemble - but that is never going to be the whole picture.