The debate is stupid because one side is taking an absolute position...
Look, I don't have a horse in this race, so let me tell you that, from the outside, it's not so clear which side is being more unreasonable. Or maybe it is.
Edit: just to add something tangible, you're misrepresenting others' position too much.
The funny thing about the anti-ORM-ists position is that they are either:
1) Exclusively embedding raw SQL in their code, and accessing each query result by also hard-coding column names and value types in map look-ups. Maybe this is a "pure" approach, but it is also very brittle as models evolve.
Or,
2) They develop their own naive ORM implementation without the self-awareness to realize that is what they are doing. As zzzeek said, "If your application has objects, and talks to a relational database to marshal result rows into instances of those objects, you are using an ORM."