Watching the Republican National Convention I felt like I sparred a few easy rounds while sitting on the sofa. Ever hear of couch-boxer?

“Opportunity rises when children are raised in homes and schools that are free from pornography, promiscuity and drugs; in homes that are blessed with family values and the presence of a father and a mother,” Mitt Romney said. “America cannot long lead the family of nations if we fail the family here at home!” He didn’t mention gay marriage specifically, but he threw a punch just the same.

I dodged and had an impulse to jab, but it’s difficult to return a punch to a television set.

John McCain, said a grinning Mike Huckabee, “doesn’t want to change the very definition of marriage from what it has always meant throughout recorded human history.”

I ducked, and felt another urge to jab with my left.

“John McCain believes in the sanctity of human life from conception. He believes in the sanctity of marriage and family life. John McCain is the leader America needs. Viva John McCain,” Tommy Espinoza told the delegates.

And I dodged again, with no place to land my counterpunch.

McCain himself, in his acceptance speech, made reference to judges who legislate from the bench, a reference to the conservative’s complaint that activist judges are pursuing a liberal agenda that includes same-sex marriage.

It was a soft right hook.

A few of the jabs smarted as conventioneers echoed the policies in the GOP’s platform, which states that homosexuality is incompatible with military service and contains a 390-word plank on “preserving traditional marriage.”

But not one speechmaker delivered a knockout punch — although there were some below-the-belt jabs from the floor by delegates interviewed by cable TV reporters.

After 12 years writing for the GLBT media and covering GLBT issues, maybe I’m well conditioned against gay bashing. After all, I trained in the gay press when Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were big-time brawlers in the anti-gay arena. By their standards, the fighters in the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul/Minnesota were bantamweights.

Sure, Mitt Romney would like to wear the heavyweight belt worn by Robertson and Falwell, but he’s what’s known in boxing lingo as a palooka — a lousy boxer, a 10th-rater who lacks conviction.

So I barely worked up a sweat watching the convention, and was puzzled I didn’t need to put up my dukes when Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin took the stage. Pundits predicted she’d deliver a culture wars speech. She spoke some about her family, but not of right-wing family values.

Missing last week in Xcel — at least for the television cameras — were the heavy-duty, fat punches of previous conventions. Just think back to Sheri Drew’s invocation at the 2004 GOP convention: “Those who support gay and lesbian families are no different from those who supported Adolf Hitler in the years preceding World War II.” That was a haymaker.

With the jabbing and poking, dodging and ducking, it seemed the GOP was pulling anti-gay punches.

Log Cabin Republicans maintain that with John McCain and Sarah Palin heading up the ticket the Republican Party might retire from the fight.

“Sen. McCain is a different kind of Republican. He understands the GOP lost its majority in Congress in 2006 largely because the Party focused on divisive social issues. Sen. McCain knows the politics of fear and division will damage our party and our nation so he’s focusing the GOP on unifying core principles such as limited government, fiscal responsibility, and a strong national defense,” LCR president Patrick Sammon said, announcing the group’s endorsement of McCain.

Maybe, as LCR asserts, the party’s getting tired, the fight’s getting old.

Or maybe last week was just a bit of sparring and, regardless of how McCain wants to fight, the title bout is yet to begin.

Lace ’em up, maybe to go the distance.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius all were scheduled to campaign for Obama in the coming weeks. Republicans say they hope Palin, who made her national debut with a feisty speech on Wednesday, could put some female voters in play.

“We respect her. She’s a skilled politician, as she proved last night,” Obama strategist David Axelrod told reporters aboard the campaign plane Thursday. “She’s deft at going on the attack.”

But it’s not clear exactly how Obama and his running mate Joe Biden should respond. They keenly remember how women rallied around one-time Democratic front runner Clinton when they perceived she was a victim of sexism. They don’t want to appear with a weak response, either, and certainly they also don’t want to send independent women flocking to the GOP.

The solution, at least in the short term, will be have top-tier female supporters vouch for Obama to largely female audiences and keep the candidate himself away.

Sebelius started on Thursday, linking Palin to the unpopular President Bush.

“She mastered the words written by the Bush speechwriters and delivered them well. But what we didn’t hear was what people talk to me about every day,” Sebelius told reporters.

Clinton, a one-time presidential front runner, was set to arrive Monday in Florida. Obama aides had long planned to have Clinton as a surrogate even before Palin was named.

Clinton’s camp says the message will be honed on her long-standing appeal to kitchen-table issues that helped her win 18 million votes, but not the nomination. There are no plans for Clinton to directly engage Palin, largely because the election is about the president, not vice president.

Obama’s senior advisers say they cannot allow Palin to paint herself as the come-from-nowhere insurgent – a role that once belonged to Obama.

“For someone who makes the point that she’s not from Washington, she looked very much like she’d fit in very well there when you see how she brings these attacks, they all felt very familiar to Americans who are used to this kind of thing from Washington,” Axelrod said.

Obama himself dodged the question about how to treat Palin, only the second woman nominated as a major party’s vice presidential pick and the GOP’s first.

“I think she’s got a compelling story, but I assume that she wants to be treated the same way that guys want to be treated, which means that their records are under scrutiny,” Obama told reporters in York. “I’ve been through this for 19 months. She has been through it – what – four days so far?”

It was slightly more polite than Axelrod: “She tried to attack Senator Obama by saying he had no significant legislative achievements. Maybe that’s what she was told.”

The McCain campaign, keenly aware of the potential of their nontraditional pick, immediately used any criticism of Palin as a sign of sexism.

Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent and a close friend of Republican presidential candidate John McCain, still caucuses with Democrats, which allows them to control the Senate with a 51-49 majority . A spokesman for Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., indicated Thursday that Lieberman may no longer be welcome.

“Lieberman went too far when he distorted Sen. Obama’s record,” said Reid spokesman Jim Manley. “From Reid’s perspective, (Lieberman) has every right to give a partisan speech to whomever he wants. But he doesn’t have the right to distort Sen. Obama’s record like that. Sen. Reid was very disappointed in Lieberman’s speech.”

Added Manley: “The Democratic caucus will likely revisit Lieberman’s situation after the November elections.”

Asked if Reid was putting Lieberman on notice, Manley replied: “Without overplaying it, the answer is, yes.”

Manley refused to discuss what options Democrats might consider in dealing with Lieberman.

“There is no plan,” Manley said. “I assume this is something the Democratic caucus will discuss after the elections in November.”

There’s speculation that if Democrats bolster their Senate majority this fall, as many predict, they could seek retribution by ousting Lieberman from his Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairmanship, a coveted post.

Lieberman said he’s not surprised that Democrats may seek to punish him. He said electing the right person to the White House is more important to him than partisan considerations.

“I am going to try to do the best I can to get the best person elected, which is McCain, and let the politics take care of itself afterward,” Lieberman said in a telephone conference call with reporters Thursday. “I understand my Democratic colleagues are not happy because I am doing something unconventional. But that, to me, just seems to be what my priorities should be right now.”

It’s no surprise that teenagers have sex—even evangelical Christian teenagers, and especially very good looking ones, in Alaska, where there’s not much to do but hunting and fishing and…well, you know.

And it’s certainly no surprise that sex makes babies.

But when a conservative politician who advocates abstinence education has a very public failure of abstinence in her own family, revealed just a few days after she’s announced as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, it’s bound to get people talking.

If nothing else, the social and political contours are interesting. Right-wingers admire Palin’s principles, but some wish she would put aside her political ambitions to tend to her family. Left-wingers reject this idea as anti-feminist, but they also reject Palin’s politics.

Let me make two things very clear.

First, Bristol Palin is not running for office; Sarah Palin is. Bristol Palin, like all expectant mothers, should be wished well—especially since she finds herself pregnant during the frenzy and scrutiny of her mother’s vice-presidential campaign. She deserves our compassion, as does her new fiancé.

Second, Sarah Palin is no hypocrite—as some uncharitable commentators have suggested—for embracing her yet-unwed pregnant daughter.

There’s no inconsistency in believing both that we should teach abstinence until marriage and that we should support those children who become pregnant anyway. There’s no hypocrisy in striving for an ideal that you and your loved ones occasionally fall short of. You don’t stop endorsing speed limits just because you (or your kids) sometimes lose track of the speedometer.

The fact is, Sarah Palin’s rejection of comprehensive sex education deserves criticism on its own merits. Her family’s behavior has nothing to do with it, aside from adding anecdotes to the statistics suggesting that “abstinence only” doesn’t achieve what its proponents hope and claim.

For example, abstinence advocates are fond of citing studies by Yale’s Hannah Brückner and Columbia’s Peter Bearman, who show that adolescents who take abstinence pledges generally delay sex about eighteen months longer than those who don’t. What the advocates don’t mention is the researchers’ finding that only 12% of these adolescents keep their pledges, and that when they do have sex, they are far less likely to use protection.

In other words, the failure rate of condoms pales by comparison to the failure rate of abstinence pledges—88%, if you believe Brückner and Bearman.

But it’s not Sarah Palin’s rejection of comprehensive sex education that’s bugging me here. What’s bugging me is the right-wing reaction, which for the most part boils down to “Nobody’s perfect, life happens, but you love and support your children and grandchildren.”

That, of course, is the proper reaction.

But it stands in sharp contrast to their usual reaction to gay kids, their rhetoric about “Love in Action” and “Love Win[ning] Out” notwithstanding.

For example, contrast the right-wing reaction to Palin’s grandchild with their reaction to Dick Cheney’s grandchild Samuel—son of his lesbian daughter Mary. At the time, Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America announced that Mary’s pregnancy “repudiates traditional values and sets an appalling example for young people at a time when father absence is the most pressing social problem facing the nation.” She was hardly alone in such denunciations.

Now here’s the same Crouse on Palin: “We are confident that she and her family will handle this unexpected situation with grace and love. We appreciate the fact that the Palins…are providing loving support to the teenager and her boyfriend.”

There are differences in the two cases to be sure. Bristol plans to marry the father, and thus will provide the baby with a “traditional” family (in one sense); Mary won’t. Bristol’s pregnancy was probably accidental, whereas Mary’s was certainly deliberate.

On the other hand, Mary’s child arrives in the home of a mature and stable couple; Bristol’s in the home of a young and hastily formed one.

But the sharpest difference in the cases is the contrast in right-wingers’ compassion. It’s the difference in empathy, a trait that’s at the core of the Golden Rule.

They tell heterosexuals: abstinence until marriage—and if you fail, we forgive you. For gays, it’s abstinence forever—and if you fail, we denounce you.

For heterosexuals, “Nobody’s perfect, life happens, but you love and support your children and grandchildren.”

For gays, not so much.

John Corvino, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit.

For more about John Corvino, or to see clips from his “What’s Morally Wrong with Homosexuality?” DVD, visit www.johncorvino.com.

“I want to pay my respects to your organization on behalf of the campaign.  Your organization is an important one in the fabric of our party,” Schmidt told the organization at a lunch in Minneapolis hosted by Log Cabin to honor openly gay convention delegates.

Schmidt has served as day-to-day campaign manager since early July.

“Keep fighting for what you believe, because the day is going to come,” Schmidt told the group.

“The Campaign’s efforts to reach out to Log Cabin members are reflective of Sen. McCain’s inclusive record and indicative of the type of campaign he is running,” said Log Cabin President Patrick Sammon.  “Log Cabin is proud to support Senator McCain in this important election.”

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter also spoke at the event.

Log Cabin’s endorsement of McCain was not unexpected, but prompted a rebuke from the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT rights organization.

“[McCain] actively campaigned for a constitutional amendment that would have banned marriage and domestic partnerships for same-sex couples in his home state of Arizona,” said HRC President Joe Solmonese.

“He went so far as to appear in television commercials for that campaign, is now supporting an amendment to strip marriage equality from California couples and has said that he would vote for a federal marriage amendment if laws already banning marriage equality were to be struck down by federal courts,” Solmonese said.

Log Cabin Republicans endorsed then-Governor George W. Bush in 2000, but declined to endorse President Bush in 2004—largely over the president’s push for a federal anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment and his decision to use gay people as a wedge issue in winning re-election.

To repeated cheers from his delegates, McCain criticized fellow Republicans as well as Democratic rival Barack Obama as he reached out to independents and disaffected Democrats.

“We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us,” he said of the Republicans who controlled Congress for most of the past 15 years.

As for Obama, he said, “I will keep taxes low and cut them where I can. My opponent will raise them. I will cut government spending. He will increase it.”

Before McCain’s speech, the climax of the final night of the party convention, delegates awarded the vice presidential nomination to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the first female ticketmate in Republican history.

“She stands up for what’s right and she doesn’t let anyone tell her to sit down,” McCain said of the woman who has faced intense scrutiny in the week since she was picked.

“And let me offer an advance warning to the old, big-spending, do-nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd: Change is coming,” McCain declared.

He and Palin were departing their convention city immediately after the Arizona senator’s acceptance speech, bound for Wisconsin and an early start on the final weeks of the White House campaign.

McCain, at 72 bidding to become the oldest first-term president, drew a roar from the convention crowd when he walked out onto the stage lighted by a single spotlight. He was introduced by a video that dwelt heavily on his time spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and as a member of Congress, hailed for a “faithful unyielding love for America, country first.”

“USA, USA, USA,” chanted the crowd in the hall.

McCain faced a delicate assignment as he formally accepted his party’s presidential nomination: presenting his credentials as a reformer willing to take on his own party and stressing his independence from an unpopular President Bush – all without breaking faith with his Republican base.

He set about it methodically.

“After we’ve won, we’re going to reach out our hand to any willing patriot, make this government start working for you again,” he said, and he pledged to invite Democrats and independents to serve in his administration.

He mentioned President Bush only in passing, as the leader who led the country through the days after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

And there was plenty for conservative Republicans to cheer – from his pledge to free the country from the grip of its dependence on foreign oil, to a vow to have schools answer to parents and students rather than “unions and entrenched bureaucrats.”

A man who has clashed repeatedly with Republicans in Congress, he said proudly, “I’ve been called a maverick. Sometimes it’s meant as a compliment and sometimes it’s not. What it really means is I understand who I work for.

“I don’t work for a party. I don’t work for a special interest. I don’t work for myself. I work for you.”

The arrests came after protesters staged their march near the state Capitol even though their permit had expired.

Among the dozens caught up in the police sweep were two Associated Press reporters on assignment to cover the event. They were issued a citation and detained, along with more than a dozen other members of the media, but were expected to be let go shortly.

Marchers tried to cross two different bridges leading from the Capitol to the Xcel Energy Center, where McCain was to accept his party’s nomination for president. But they were stopped by lines of police in gas masks and riot gear who blocked the bridges after the marching permit expired.

A cat-and-mouse game followed as protesters moved around the Capitol area, splintered, and then organized into a marching force again. The size of the crowd varied from a high of about 1,000 down to a hundred and back to around 500.

About three hours into the standoff, about 300 protesters sat down on a major thoroughfare and police closed the four-lane boulevard. Officers then set off smoke bombs and fired seven percussion grenades, causing protesters to scatter.

Police surrounded about 200 people, including AP reporters Amy Forliti and Jon Krawczynski and reporters from other news outlets. Officers ordered them to sit on the pavement on a bridge over Interstate 94 and to keep their hands over their heads as they were led away two at a time.

The arrests came three days after AP photographer Matt Rourke, also on assignment covering the protests, was arrested. He was released without being charged Monday after being held for several hours.

A spokesman at an information center set up during the convention said 12 people had been arrested so far but that number would increase as people were processed.

Some of the scattering protesters entered a residential area north of the Capitol. Later, at least three smoke bombs were discharged in the area of apartments and houses.

About two hours into the standoff, police began arresting a handful of people even as the crowd dwindled from around 1,000 to around a hundred.

“The important thing is even though we didn’t have a permit to march, people have decided they want to keep protesting despite all these riot police,” said Meredith Aby, a member of the Anti-War Committee.

Even as protesters were being arrested, the mood was much more relaxed than earlier in the week. It even turned festive at times.

Younger people did cartwheels. Tourists came by to check out the spectacle. The chants, which were political at the outset, turned silly a couple hours in.

“You’re sexy, you’re cute, take off the riot suit,” protesters serenaded those blocking their path.

Brandon Thorson didn’t find much to joke about. The 23-year-old factory worker from Minneapolis said he just wanted to go home – but he tried to do it through police lines.

“One officer used his club to push me away and another officer hit me in the back with his club,” Thorson said. “A third officer came in and sprayed me right in the face.”

Minutes after the skirmish, Thorson’s right eye was nearly swollen shut from the pepper spray. He was not arrested.

“This is a fascist military style occupation of the city of St. Paul,” Thorson said. “Just because the Republicans are in town doesn’t mean they can turn our city into a battlefront.”

More than 400 people have been arrested in the past week, most on Monday, when violence broke out at the end of another anti-war march.

The Anti-War Committee, which organized Thursday’s march, urged others to join in and denounced the increased presence of police in riot gear and acts of “intimidation” in the city.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty blamed the week’s violence on a small group of “anarchists, nihilists, and goofballs who want to break stuff and hurt people.”

“They need to be dealt with,” Pawlenty said in a radio interview with WCCO-AM of Minneapolis.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday to recover leaflets seized during police raids, claiming a violation of First Amendment rights because protesters haven’t been able to distribute the flyers.

Well, the Washington Post says that Gov. Sarah Palin’s lipstick joke from Wednesday night’s speech was actually stolen from Hagee’s book, where he says:

“Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher? The answer is lipstick.”

Guffaw.

This makes me angry.

Because we all remember the expression on George W.’s face when he found out what had happened – while reading My Pet Goat.

Did they forget that Republicans were in office when this happened?