As if the pro-choicers have not made many compromises, including most of us agreeing to adhere to the laws, and to work within the system to change them.

I'm certainly glad you are mostly agreeing to adhere to the laws. I'm not sure what working outside the system would be, unless it's civil disobedience or guerrilla warfare. I suspect you would agree as a matter of practicality that without a base of sympathy those would be worse than useless.

Compromise has to be judged by your power relations. We pedophiles have very close to zero power. None. Nada.

But I didn't really want to get into the sexual contact question here -- I'm speaking of the broader liberal agenda, where of course people do have some power.

there is exactly what mainstream (read: "respectable") liberals have done since they become cowed shadows of their 1960s-'70s counterparts that helped establish such rapid beneficial change during that era.

Do you recall the Reagan landslides? A rightward shift in public opinion? Democrats had to tack right to stay a relevant political party. Without popular support you can do nothing. There is a role for a few strong liberal voices keeping to the old principles, but most have to follow the people. Try to lead, sure, but if they're not following, you've got to find a better message. That is what democracy is about, ultimately. However exasperated we might be with voters, they get to decide who runs the country.

Perhaps you'll stay with the Dissy plan because it's something of a GC consensus.
And going by consensus is nothing you ever do, right, Ethan? I guess any portion of any minority group who doesn't agree with the status quo opinion must all be giving into groupthink, eh?

You misunderstand me. I am not deriding that view. I am saying it is a reasonable thing to do within my framework of how to make decisions about such questions. Having laid out a suggestion for how to make decisions on complicated topics, I raise points that do not support my preferred view on the immediate question at hand.

And note how you deny in other places attributing the idea of fundamental change being possible to me alone, yet here you call it the "Dissy plan"?

Your name labels it because you are the one who expresses a view at length and in detail. It doesn't speak to how many people subscribe to it and to what extent -- something I don't know. If someone else like Dante expressed a coherent view of that kind and I disagreed with it and no one ELSE critiqued it, I'd probably post a critique of it too.

Because living full time within the virtual walls of GC, they never thought about any of the mainstream rhetoric before, right?

Communities on the web have a tendency for epistemic closure, where people of like mind reinforce each other's beliefs and shut out competing views. So I don't assume that people are continually being exposed to more mainstream views and taking them seriously.

Thank you for reminding what you seem to perceive as "Dissy's mindless followers" that they can [retain a pro-contact opinion], Ethan. I'm sure they agree that they totally deserved your condescending, paternalistic tone in this post

No one has to read my posts who doesn't want to. I hope people will realize that my post was advice offered in a respectful spirit. Those who are confident in their beliefs and capabilities may decide it doesn't apply to them but understand that others might benefit by it.

I don't think you know as much about the posters here as you think, especially those who do not express political views. I'm certain you don't know about the views of the lurkers.