I see you've been reading my responses in these threads with great interest lately. Cool.

Anyhow, I have discussed the concept of positive and negative rights before on this board, as it was first introduced to me in those specific terms years ago right here by Mesmerised.

The liberals during the 1950s were actively promoting better treatment, if not full equality, for people of different races and non-Christian religions. The movement for civil rights had reached a sufficient point to make such a thing acceptable (note how desegregation of the schools was occurring in large measure during that decade), so by that time liberals were no longer focused so disproportionately on labor rights alone. However, liberals of the time had nothing but condemnation for homosexuality, yet another thing the liberals of today like to forget about on purpose. Not only that, but two of the four Senators involved in the McCarthyist hearings were Democrats, which mirrors the contemporary hesitation of progressives in the Democratic Party from saying anything other than the main party line against the "war on terror." Of course, the war on terror is the modern equivalent of the war on "communism," just as MAPs have taken the place of homosexuals as the official "sexual bogeyman."

Many of our fellow comic book fans do not realize this, but Dr. Frederic Wertham--the author of Seduction of the Innocent--and main architect of the hysterical moral backlash against comic books that led to the industry establishing the self-censoring Comic Book Code (which reads like a totalitarian manual)--was a devout liberal, and a Democrat (the two usually do go hand-in-hand). Though he condemned the relationship of Batman and Robin because he imagined these fictional characters were secretly lovers, never did he use the word "pedophile" to condemn them. Instead, he focused his critique on their alleged homosexual coupling, since they were the Sexual Bogeyman of the era. He also condemned Wonder Woman and her fellow Amazons since Paradise Island implied that a lot of lesbian love was going on there, as well as suggesting that she encouraged an inappropriate amount of independence in the girls who read the book. Sound familiar?

The mainstream liberals have never been good on fighting hard and unwavering for civil rights, except during their glory period of the 1960s and 1970s, where much progressed thanks to their efforts. After those two decades, however, they lost the balls they had during that time, and barely resisted the conservatives and right-wingers on anything any more, to the point where the term "liberal" often became synonymous with "wimp." It's usually been the much maligned radicals--whom liberals are often fond of attacking--that fought on the margins of politics to make various progressive issues debatable for the liberals to take up in the first place.