Minds are funny. I just Google+1ed a post at Casaubon's Book, something I rarely do. (The writer Sharon Astyk is deep into the foodie movement: peak oil, locavore, sustainable, etc. but very articulate.) The post was about gay marriage, and noted the legal and property considerations involved in marriage--recommend it. She would qualify as a political "progressive" in most people's books.
Anyway, the next post on my RSS feed was Chris Clayton's column at "The Progressive Farmer". The conjunction of someone who's really progressive and the magazine, which isn't progressive at all, at least in the sense that some of the conservatives I follow would use it (i.e., as an epithet, a tad better than "socialist" but much worse than "liberal") struck me.
"Progessive" as used in connection with farming used to mean the wide-awake, up-to-date farmer, someone who was on his way to being an "industrial" farmer, as the foodies would have it. It's rather ironic to me to see the evolution of the term.
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