The XX Factor: What women really think.

Are Traditional Christians Necessarily Haters?

So where we differ is not so much on Warren himself, or over gay marriage, for that matter. It's not over censorship, as I'm sure we agree that the KKK can march around Skokie to their shriveled little hearts content and yay, odious speech. Though you think Obama's pick of Warren as official prayer-sayer is bad optics and I think it's great politics, even that isn't our real difference. Which is that I don't think opposing gay marriage automatically makes someone a bigot or a homophobe, and if I read you correctly, you do. But can you really write off the millions of people who read their Bible that way? (Don't they write off gay people?) Doubtless some do, but their traditional definition of marriage does not necessarily make them haters, does it? How could I view the Bible as (among other things) a cultural document and not see Bible readers as products of our various cultures, too?

The conservative Illinois town where I grew up (and where Obama not only lost to McCain in '08, but to ALAN KEYES for U.S. Senate in ‘04) was so lacking in diversity that we didn't have that much to work with, bias-wise, and the only conflict was the Christians versus the other Christians. Some of the neighbor kids who went to different churches were always letting us know that because we were Catholic (had not been baptized the right way, and had parents who drank and danced, though not as often as they would have liked) we were totally going to hell. So we'd run into the house - Oh no, so-and-so says we haven't been saved! -- and my Republican dad, whose greatest heartbreak in life is that he somehow wound up with the world's most liberal daughter - yes, everything really is relative -- never got the least bit worked up about our likely damnation, or ever, ever hit back: "That's what they believe,'' he'd say, and that would be that. Which was kind of frustrating at the time. But when I think now about what tolerance looks like, I do think of him shrugging and going, "That's what they believe,'' and I wish I were more like that.

Change Is Good. Polls Are Caca.

1) Change is good: The single most unambiguous piece of information to come out of last night is that Democrats see the promise of change as way more important than the value of experience—52 percent to 23 percent said it was the No. 1 thing they were looking for in a candidate. And since in '08 shorthand Obama equals change and Clinton equals experience, this can only be good news for him; the candidate who wins the argument about what the election is over generally wins the election. (Only "generally'' may no longer apply, which leads us to our second lesson.)

2) Polls are caca, and all the rules have been suspended. Even more than has been generally acknowledged, this race is so fluid and voters so volatile that pollsters can't seem to keep up, and known patterns seem not to apply. The good in this is that it challenges some of our laziest assumptions and silliest stereotypes like ...

3) Conservatives are sheep who go bah, bah, bah all the way home. Not true, and I don't think it's so much that conservative talk radio has lost its influence as that it never had the authority to issue edicts in the first place; when Rush and Laura and Sean reflect conservative opinion, they do magnify it, but when they don't, voters seem to have no trouble dissenting.

4) Women across the ideological spectrum look great in red. Nah, scratch that one; Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama look good in anything. And on that positive note, one day down, 39 to go.