This is taken and expanded from my comment to
this thread
At MyDD, Chris Bowers calls for sex to be an issue for the Democrats in 2006. This has some merit. Certainly, the polls suggest that the Republicans have done some overstepping on the limits of government in the Terry Schiavo case. It is also fraught with pitfalls, from a public relations standpoint. It is not an obvious winning issue, and will be a losing issue, if framed improperly.
It would be completely the wrong thing to say or imply that all sex is good. George Michael was incorrect when he sang that "Sex is natural, sex is good. / Not everybody does it, but everybody should." The wrong impression is that Democrats are a bunch of "free love hippies" trying to justify hedonistic sex. That is exactly the image that Republicans will use to attack us if "sex" becomes the issue. For fans of Lakoff, ifRepublicans are the "Strict Daddy," then framing this issue wrongly will make us look like the permissive parent who raises either an overly indulged spoiled brat or an unsupervised child who is taught nothing about right and wrong.
What we should say is that, even though some expressions of sexuality are improper or morally/ethically wrong, government should (reluctantly) permit them because: 1) people have a right to be wrong, within reason; 2) government can't do everything and things like Howard Dean style sane enforcement of drug laws, rational national defense, and realistic health care reform are better priorities for the use of government power; 3) people have a legitimate right to privacy.
Recently, Democrats have made proposals in the area of trying to decrease the number of legal abortions. Democrats need a similar set of counterproposals in the area of sexuality. If abstinence-only education doesn't work, Democrats nevertheless need to endorse abstinence as part of a comprehensive sex education, as abstinence is an entirely possible human behavior. If gay rights is a plank in the Democratic platform, prominent Democrats need to stand up and say that irresponsible behavior on the part of homosexuals who should know better is at least partly to blame for the spread of HIV and this is something that no amount of education or government effort can fix. If it is true that AIDS is an epidemic in Africa, we should still acknowledge that it is much less of a problem in areas dominated by Catholicism or Islam (which may or may not be due to underreporting) and that much of the spread of HIV involves people having sex when they shouldn't be, such as married men who visit prostitutes or keep a mistress, in the end passing on the virus to their innocent wives.
Two things go together here. Responsible government and responsible personal behavior, and a responsible government acknowledges that it can't make individuals live up to all social responsibilities, no matter how reprehensible their behavior. What has been missing from liberals is an acknowledgement that a just set of laws permits outrageous behavior that we wish wouldn't happen.
Although Democrats are not the party of the minimal state, neither are they the party of big government. Democrats, in my view, stand for a manageable-sized government that does as much as is possible within limits. Democrats also stand for freedom of conscience, and while this freedom is normally interpreted as permitting the righteous to hold fast against the tide of public opinion, it has the flip side of protecting the aberrantly wrong, even though they may be a slim minority. Freedom's price is that we must tolerate stupidity, immorality, and even malice.