Spoke up for the environment. Whether you agree with the science or not, it means there will continue to be a discussion.

I think this falls under the "lately" category to a large extent. From the time of the first Earth Day, when real progress was made against poisoning air and water, and protecting the environment from real dangers, we seem to have moved into a zone of massive overkill, where the objective seems to be to protect the environment from any form of change at all, harmful or otherwise. If humans do it, it's by definition suspect. "Whether you agree with the science or not" isn't the half of it.

Defended political speech, including some speech not particularly attractive to it.

Frankly, I'm not sure who the heck is stopping political speech in the first place. The Left has a much longer record of trying to squelch political opposition by legal force than the Right does, although neither side is blameless. Joke about the universities if you like, but these are the crucibles of our Western civilization, and right now they are forging mostly one philosophical viewpoint, and it's anti-Western.

Attempted to allow homosexual people to make decisions for their terminally ill partners, etc., by extending the legal protections of domestic partnership to them.

I'll give you this one, to some extent.

Oddly, the kind of legal relationship you are talking about has been available for any two people at all--relatives, non-relatives, partners, or whatever--by simply signing some papers in front of a lawyer. In my opinion, to those trying to neutralize what they consider old-fashioned and "oppressive" values, it's never been about "domestic partnerships," but about cultural war.

Were the first to speak up for the oppressed women of Afghanistan, even though roundly ignored by the Right until the oppressors also sheltered the engineers of 911.

Very good point. I have looked into this. NOW was on the case for the women of Afghanistan long before 9/11, and they deserve credit for this.

Fought to keep religion out of the public schools generally, and out of the science classroom in particular.

You want to keep preaching out of the public schools, fine. Frankly, this entire dog's breakfast is rooted in the very concept of "government schools," but that's another story. Now, if we can just back off a little bit from the point where liberal brains explode like eggs in a microwave when some hapless kid says "Jesus" in school. I'm getting fed up with idiots acting like the Spanish Inquisition is champing at the bit, waiting only for the opening provided by someone posting the Ten Commandments on his wall, or mentioning creation in a science class. There are real theocracies out there, with real nastiness. In fact, we've been fighting them. How about some perspective?

It gets hard sometimes not to think that the issue is less about the First Amendment, and more about a general leftist hostility toward Middle American values. In fact, a suspiciously large amount of leftist attitudes could be explained this way. I have a few theories on this.

In the old days, some public schools used to take native American children and punish them for speaking their own language, or expressing their own spiritual beliefs. They needed "enlightening," you see.

Continued to point out that fighting AIDS without mentioning condoms because it offends the Right's fundamentalist constituency is, to put it kindly, counterproductive.

I don't know. AIDS was the first politically-protected disease. Unless you were born with it, or got it from a blood transfusion, you cannot catch it unless you are doing something you shouldn't be doing in the first place.

An uninfected person who lives according to those "old fashioned, oppressive values" won't, barring some freak accident of blood transfusion or something, catch the AIDS virus. They just won't. This is the direction nobody on the Left wants to look.

We were forbidden in the early years from fighting AIDS by attacking the obvious promiscuous behaviors that spread it, and the result was widespread infection and death. The poor victims who first caught it had no idea what they were dealing with. Nobody today has that excuse.

The failure rate of condoms with the AIDS virus is a tricky business. Both sides "cook" the statistics in their favor. But assuming that the rate is as low as 1 in 50 (the Planned Parenthood figure with what they call "perfect use"), one wonders how a manufacturer of a safety item would be treated by regulators if it has a 1 in 50 rate of killing a user.

Again, I wonder how much of this is just an allergy to the kind of values that abstinence and monogamy implies. Mentioning condoms as part of an education program is one thing. Telling someone "if it feels good, do it, just use a condom" or saying "people will do whatever they want anyway, so there's no point in setting standards or limits," is something else.

Kept alive the idea that drug use and abuse is a health problem and is better treated by doctors and nurses than by police officers and officers of the court.

A lot of libertarians feel the same way. On the other hand, a liberal will applaud me getting arrested by those same officers and courts for not wearing a seat belt. Go figure.

Continued to push for adequate health care that will not bankrupt the working poor or leave the elderly poor in substandard nursing facilities.

Everybody thinks these people should have health care. The difference is that the Left still harbors socialist fantasies about how everyone can have everything for free, and nobody will go broke providing it. I wish they taught economics in schools along with sex education.

Had the nerve to be outraged as well as embarrassed by the use of torture as a questioning technique by otherwise civilized nations.

Fine. While your motives might be pure in this, a lot of the same people howling about Abu Ghraib now have spent a lot of their lives kissing the asses of people like Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat. Seems to be a little selective blindness there. Is this really about torture for them, or just about opposition to American actions?