good and bad and right and left

I think that is one of the beliefs of the stoics, that actions are right in and of themselves, regardless of what effect they have.  The left generally believes in utilitarianism where the good or bad is determined by what the effects of the actions are.  There are a couple weaknesses in that, one is that you have to define what kind of effects  you want to have, what kind of world do you want?  Very broadly I think the left wants to have the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, which is still pretty vague, but an equal amount of goods for everybody and equal rights for everybody is probably a good approximation.

The other weakness is how can you know what effects your actions will have, especially in the longer run?  I think that is gotten around by just being concerned with the immediate results, and maybe a little beyond that.

Let's consider your two sins, abortion and homosexuality.  Well abortion is killing something.  We can argue about whether or not it is a human being at the time it is killed, but it is killing something, so that looks pretty wrong.  The left would argue that the more important issue is a woman having control over her body, and that trumps the killing.  Of course that killing is minimized by not thinking of it as a human being, which we can argue all day on, but not today.  But here's an example of the right believing that an act is always wrong, and the right believing that a little wrong is trumped by the greater good. 

Homosexuality is only considered a sin because the bible is against it.  But correct me if I am wrong, but it is no big deal in the bible, it only mentions it a few times, and those in the Old Testament where it is also against eating shellfish, and equally against divorce, which is still a little iffy, but nobody is saying divorced people shouldn't get married again.  Well the Catholic church, but it is not one of their most favored doctrines, and especially in the states, widely ignored. 

So if you take out those bible references how is homosexuality a moral issue?  See here are people doing something that does not effect you at all, so why is it an issue with you?

There's a dos and don'ts element of this bible morality.  Mostly people believe in not doing the don'ts (sins) no cheating, no stealing, no getting drunk, no playing cards, as long as you don't do these things, you are probably going to heaven or at least you will be able to hold your head high and look down at the sinners.  But there are the dos too, mostly love everybody and help the poor, and a lot of people don't want to love the sinners and their idea of helping the poor is putting bibles into the chest of drawers in the poor house.

Let me take a stab at those terms.  Liberals are people who have kind of an open mind about doing things, but they are always questioning things, so sometimes they seem weak, radicals want to do something out of the mainstream and they want to do it fast, and conservatives want to keep everything as it is, except that modern day hard shell conservatives (tea partiers) want to change everything from the way it is now.  In actual effect, though they might have dictionary definitions, they are just terms thrown around to make you look good and your opponent look bad.

You're right about race being more of an urban problem than a rural one in that the poor (who are disproportionately black) flock to the cities and there are no big streets to march down in the country.  I just feel that city people get the short end of the stick in the media where the country folk are assumed to be the real Americans while the city people are considered a bunch of bad guys and how did they get here anyway?  Maybe I am being too thin-skinned.

Absolutely us writer guys had a better image in the fifties when we could smoke our asses off till the room was one big cloud, and those old typewriters, you could really bang on the keys, and at the end of the line you could slap that carriage back with that satisfying ring, and best of all, when you didn't like what you wrote you could rip the paper out of the machine and crush it and toss it at that wire wastebasket, which you mostly missed, but that too was cool.  And you had a bottle of cheap whiskey on the desk and a fedora on your head.

Smoking is bad for a computer?