The glass is always half-empty for the paleo-Left The American Prospect has a heart-felt piece on the expansion of the circle-of-tolerance toward homosexuals in the past 15 years. But it concludes on this sour note:

Compare that with anything else on a progressive's wish list: universal health care, a livable minimum wage, progressive taxation, racial equality, environmental preservation, comparable worth, subsidized child care, public housing. These ask Americans not for freedom from one another but responsibility for one another -- responsibilities that are most costly for those most likely to vote. "To what extent is the gay and lesbian movement overall a progressive movement?" muses Cathcart. While most self-identified lesbians and gay men are Democrats and many work actively on other progressive issues, there's a reason gay Republicans feel no contradiction between their two group memberships: Liberty and justice based on sexual orientation would redistribute not a penny.

Oh, the horrors! I read The American Prospect regularly, it makes me think less and less of the "progressive" nature of the Left. How can they make liberty and justice seem like inimical values? Another one of the articles in the current online issue is titled Cold Comfort: For-profit health care has failed in the U.S. So now its sponsors hope to export it to Canada. I'm joining the Samizdata boycott, let's call a spade a spade, these aren't liberals, they're Leftist Socialists. They march under the banner "Three cheers for Hobbes, Marx and regulation!" No point in telling the Leftist homosexual activists that collectivization didn't seem to help the gay subcultures of Cuba or the Soviet Union [1]. [1] The Communist response to homosexuality was often perplexed and more mixed than one might suppose, but too often they believed homosexuality was a manifestation of bourgeois decadence. I believe sexual freedom is most at home in the culture of plenitude-not one of enforced egalitarianism and central control.