You know the problem with porn? It's so common that it's lost the ability to shock, so Tom has to resort to condemning porn in order to start a fight at a liberal website. How dare he say such a thing? It's an insult to liberal values!

I'll leave it to Tom to discuss the substantive differences between promoting legal censorship and just acknowledging that a lot of folks think too much porn-- and excessively large Big Gulps -- aren't good for our society, even if they don't want to ban either.

But it is interesting that some liberals condemn religiously-based OPINIONS the way conservatives often condemn sexual imagery or other libertine values. You get the sense that some liberals aren't really looking for a live-and-let-live society but to clone themselves and their values everywhere.

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I'm not sure where I come down on the issue of compromise on ENDA at the federal level, since my general position is that federal policy is usually so institutionally compromised by filibusters, holding out for perfection is usually doomed. But I did want to note that E.J. significantly downplayed success at the state level where she said only 13 states had prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians.

In fact, 13 states ban discrimination against gays and lesbians AND ban discrimination based on gender identity/expression, while another seven states just ban discrimination against gays and lesbians. And many of these are our largest states, so over 43% of the American population live in states where discrimination against gays and lesbians is banned-- and 30% of the population live in states that ban discrimination based on gender identity.

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I hope folks read Tom Perriello's post carefully on how Dems can use a moral argument for withdrawing troops from Iraq-- and think about how amazing it would be to have someone like him replace a neanderthal like Virgil Goode from that Southern Virginia district.

Full disclosure-- Tom is a good friend of mine but he is also one of those folks who walks the walk on international justice. For the last few years, when he wasn't helping launch various progressive religous left efforts (Faithful America, Catholics for the Common Good) or launching his global MoveOn-like avaaz.org, he's been spending months and even years in Sierra Leone, Darfur and Afghanistan, talking to regular folks about how to restore sanity to lives racked by violence and oppression. He missed attending my wedding because he had previous engagements in the back hills of Afghanistan interviewing warlords and their victims, while thinking about a moral approach to counter-insurgency.

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