Ramesh – All your points are well-taken. I guess I’m a bit cynical about those who tried to make Santorum’s comments the moral equivalent of Lott’s. First, since I flatly reject the facile analogy of gays to blacks, I always treat such arguments as — for want of a better word — theatrical or propagandistic. It seemed to me at the time and seems to me now as well, that many of the people who said Santorum’s “sins” were as a great as Lott’s were trying to make it so by saying it was so. In this sense there was something of a Stalinist strain to the denunciation of Santorum. Good liberals felt they had to call Santorum a bigot and the moral equivalent of a racist even though many of them understood that the issue — and Santorum’s comments — are complicated than that. I’m sure some people believed it, but I got the sense the real point of that argument was to close off debate and delegitimize opponents. Over all, you may think gay activists haven’t “won” yet, but it seems to me there on a “mopping up” mission now — going after pockets of resistance and the like. When you contemplate how hard it would be to put the genie back in the bottle, it looks to me like there’s still shooting but the war is effectively over.