APOLOGY....In my post yesterday about the liberal center, I used as an example of extremism:

....gay rights parades that seem deliberately designed to repulse as many ordinary people as possible.

The point I was trying to make was that many traditionally valued moderates have an intensively negative reaction toward the more outré of these kinds of parades. Since we need the votes of these people in order to win elections, I think it would be a good idea to tone down this kind of stuff and pay more attention to how other people view us, not how we view ourselves.

However, I've been convinced that my message didn't get across and that my choice of words was needlessly offensive. I apologize for that.

Overall reaction to my post was, um, not so hot — at least from the liberal end of the blogosphere. Responses here:

• Atrios
  

• Jeanne d'Arc
  

• Mac Diva
  

• Pandagon
  

At the risk of annoying some of these people all over again, I suspect that part of their reaction to my post might be a result of not fully understanding just how far from the center some of us liberal bloggers are. If you're in the leftmost 10% of the population, but you think of yourself as being just a hardcore liberal — but still a mainstream one — that's going to lead you to some conclusions about winning elections that really don't hold water.

If you're curious to find out just how liberal (or conservative) you are, try taking this quickie test on social values. Yeah, it's just a dumb internet survey, but it's not too bad as a quick and dirty test of where you fall in the political spectrum.

And how did I do? All I'll say is that I took it twice, and Calpundit got a different score than Kevin Drum did.