Your anger is real, but this is not the time to capitalize on it. This election will close enough that we cannot afford progressives absenting themselves because the Democratic candidate is insufficiently zealous about their personal number one issue. The only way you can rationalize not voting for Obama is if you believe that there is no difference, as far as women's rights are concerned, between him and John McCain. And that is simply not true. Even without adopting any policies from your list (and I'm pretty sure Obama can be trusted to try for proper sex-ed, which McCain absolutely cannot), Obama's aims are more likely to be in harmony with your own than McCain's are. And, as an aside, some of the items on your list Clinton wouldn't have adopted; they are not politically expedient, and no politician in this country (who wants to win, anyway) is going to adopt a plank that is not expedient.

Secondly, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that a significant minority of women did follow your advice and embrace their anger, vote McCain, write in Hillary, or just stay home, and in doing so swing the election to McCain. How does this help? You've had a snit, and now not only are your goals scuppered for another four, maybe eight, years, but so are the goals of the entire progressive movement (such as it is in this country). You don't think that's going to breed some enmity? You don't think it might actually make the greater portion of the Democratic party more hostile to women candidates and women's issues rather than less? And let's not forget that a continuation of Republican hard-right policies would itself be detrimental to your goal of gender equality.

What I'm trying to say is this: we need every vote this year, and to throw it away because you are upset about how your candidate was treated in the primaries (justifiably so or not I won't even try to reckon) is not only selfish, but self-sabotaging. If I thought that the Democrat was going to win by a landslide in November, I'd say go ahead and cast a protest vote; we can afford it. But we probably can't, and it's impossible to know in advance if we could. I'm sorry, but this is a year for pragmatism. The world isn't always going to move forward on our say-so, and rather than pack up our toys and go home in a huff, we have to settle for what forward progress we can.

I tolerate wrongheaded views like creationism by not going and burning their holders' houses down. The social contract doesn't ask anything further of me. I am not obliged to embrace it or to accommodate it in any way.

You ask why belief is different from skin color? I have a question of my own: Why are right-thinking, tolerant individuals repulsed by white supremacists? Surely those poor racists are just as oppressed by their own odious beliefs as brown-skinned people are by them! Beliefs can be demonstrably wrong, and moreover they can be harmful; skin color and other superficial human differences would be irrelevant but for the beliefs of people who erroneously attach importance to them. If sizable minority of people weren't getting their children the routine childhood vaccination schedule because their reading of the Great Sloth God's Book of Wisdom told them that disease was a curse from the Great Sloth and that to try to thwart the Great Sloth's will was blasphemy, would you be so understanding of their right to believe whatever the hell they wanted? Would a few yearly Mumps deaths be a reasonable cost to pay for tolerance?

As for science creating the kind of technological imbalances that brought about Imperialism, I would like to point out two things: Firstly, that while superiority does indeed breed conquest, it need not be scientific superiority. The imperial impulse was around long before the Western World gained a significant technological edge over everyone else and went on to build world-spanning empires. Secondly, it's amusing to listen to a man who makes his living disseminating his writing over the internet decry the imperial inequality created by insufficiently universal technological progress. That must not be a particularly uncomfortable hair shirt you're wearing, Sir.

Some beliefs should be ridiculed. Simple as that. There's no love or engagement in it.