It’s a hopeful sign to see more mainstream liberal pundits finally waking up to the fact that the moral argument is actually their friend.  This from Slate, in an article on Reclaiming The Morality Of Abortion…

Liberals have never won anything by reframing moral questions as pragmatic ones; they end up looking shifty and evasive. 

And…cowardly.  Here’s why the moral argument matters…

The gay-rights movement best illuminates the need to emphasize the role of morality in politics. In 1986, the Supreme Court decided Bowers v. Hardwick, upholding the constitutionality of criminal penalties for gay sodomy. Choice, said the five-justice majority, although available for a wide range of decisions (including abortion), was not available for conduct we consider really, really icky. (They didn’t say that explicitly; they put the words in the mouth of the "Judeo-Christian" tradition and let the priests say it for them.) Just as Bowers was decided, however, the AIDS epidemic motivated and enabled gay people to tell the world why their behavior was moral. As gay men began to die, they and their loved ones began to write about their relationships, their shared homes, and their desire—going back to Homer—to bury those they loved. At the same time, lesbians, who had been fighting for their children after divorces and for the families they were creating with donor insemination—publicly told the story of their own moral commitments.

By the time the Supreme Court faced the previously sinful gay litigants again in Lawrence v. Texas, 17 years later, the decision went the other way. It is impossible to read the two opinions and ignore the change in moral climate that produced the legal shift. And although recent polling fails to reveal a majority supporting gay marriage, the numbers have been steadily improving.

To fight for your own part in the American Dream, you must first fight for the American Dream.  That, Liberty And Justice For All thing.  Eight years of George Bush, and the collapse of America’s moral stature among the nations of the world, right as one of the world’s great tyrannies rousts itself from a short slumber to start eating its neighbors again, is the price we are paying now for ceding the moral ground to the human hating Right.  There is a pragmatic human potential and productivity side to the fight for democracy and freedom.  But it should never replace the moral struggle for liberty and justice, for the human status.  The struggle for freedom has always been a profoundly moral struggle.