In other words, if YOU disagree with the position, it is not a principle.

And you can't make a rational analogy. This would only fit if we were discussing a case where the students had walked out on a prom, rather than attend with a same-sex couple. No, I am talking about society and institutions revoking marital privileges rather than extend them equally to same-sex (or multiple) partnerships.

Why should they indulge in expensive court challenges when all they have to do is cancel the event? They still win, because they don't have to host the same-sex couple. Only in a child's head is getting to say "I win" more important than getting the end result. This was in no way about contests, for either party. The student wants X the school does not want to give her X. They win. The fact that everyone else is deprived of Y is incidental. No one directly involved cares about someone ruling on whether or not the kid is entitled to what she wants as much as the actual facts of whether or not she gets it.

It would be a tangent, if I cared about some rug-munching child who knows her gender is inferior. My point as alluded in the TITLE of my freaking post, is about liberals and their crusades. But there's your liberal myopia - the discussion is not on the topic YOU want to discuss, therefore it is a "tangent" regardless of the fact that I am staying on MY point. You, being liberally blind, simply cannot understand my point, so you think I am on a tangent. Hint, hint: It's not about you.

Except that is not what I said - I said that identifying people's preferences and forcing them to act against those preferences without being able to see that this could cause those people to react in a way you don't like is an apparently all too common failing. After all, the description you give is what everyone does against things they don't like. I am talking about your habit of compelling others to behave in a certain way without being able to logically infer the results your compulsion will have, from the mindset you yourselves attribute to these people.

It is certainly a form of irrational behavior, at least when applied to skin color. But that's the thing - you attribute the refusal to accomodate people of a certain skin color to an irrational attitude, and you are surprised when they behave irrationally. I was not defending the people who act this way, I was saying that your approach to problems is not unlike baiting someone to do bad things, because it would be wrong for them to do it. It doesn't make them right, but it DOES make YOU stupid. You may have the right to walk through a crime-infested neighborhood known to be hostile to people of your visible ethnic traits. That doesn't make it smart. And the moral wrongness of your assaulters does not get you any less hurt. My point in this post was not about being right or wrong for same sex couples to attend a prom, it was that we should not be surprised if attempting to force the issue leads to things like this. The rightness or wrongness of the school district in this case is irrelevant to my point. My point is, they could have been, and as it turned out, WERE, just as committed to preventing the kid from getting her way as she was to getting it. Since they had the power, they won.

It was not about an argument or giving a damn about convincing liberals - it was about not having a prom where girls were dressed as boys and bringing female dates. Maybe the kid was only trying to make a point. The school district was about getting their way. And they did. Win all the arguments you want, there are times when it does not pay to win.

Why should they? They are not about taking stands on the issue - they didn't need the headache, so they called it off. That is simply more of your myopia - you can't see that sometimes people are just not interested in getting down in the dirt with you. When they have other priorities, they are going to do what is right for THEM, and you're simply going to take a lot of people down with you. I would not have had a problem if the girl had the guts to say "Good! If I can't be what I want at the prom, at least no one else can either." It was her whining that she did not think they would cancel the prom that exasperated me. This child was arrogantly assuming (if your version is correct) that the grown-ups whose job was to run a school district, of which hosting a stupid party was a very minor side aspect, were going to stoop to a debate and contest with her on equal terms.

Actually there is, since universally heterogenous couples at school functions, and accepted codes of formal wear for genders go back a lot to well before the first ruling against prayer in school. And what do court precedents have to do with right and wrong? By the reasoning you suggest here (the apparent principle that the first court victory settles the argument forever), the Dred Scott case should still be the law of the land.

Or grown-ups with better things to do than get in a dogfight with a child who doesn't want to play by the rules established for the event they hosted.