Stultis - Thanks for the history. It helps explain. I still wonder about the passion that the subject engenders. Perhaps some of the creationists can help explain.
Don't know what to tell you. It's a whole host of issues, a bit different from one individual to another I think.
Part of it may be the "special status" of human beings. Darwin was deeply disappointed, for instance, that his good friend and (geological) mentor, Charles Lyell, never really quite accept human evolution. That seems to have been due to religious sentiment (possibly a fear that making man fully a part of nature called into question the afterlife and reunification with loved ones) even though Lyell was not particularly orthodox.
Even the co-discoverer of evolution by means of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, did not accept the natural evolution of the human mind, taking on that subject a mystical bent. He was a believer in Spiritualism.
William Jennings Bryant, a leading antievolutionist of the 20's, and an instigator of the Scopes law, famously admitted that he didn't really much care if animals and plant evolved, so long as humans were excepted.
Few today take this position of only excepting humans, except for maybe some of the "New-Age" antievolutionists. Today usually either it's biblical inerrancy/literalism or more general fear that evolution is somehow "atheistic". However, as my earlier message hinted at, I think the inerrancy/literalism objection is, to a certain degree, something that fundamentalists have "talked themselves into."
Sorry for the rambling reflections, without coming to much of a conclusion.