In light of Obama’s past support for gay marriage as a state legislator and his recent refusal to sign an order barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, it would be logical to assume that — sans a full-scale reversal (which may be in the works tonight) — the president’s position has been “evolving” toward more entrenched opposition to equality.

Yet, somehow, many liberal pundits nonetheless defended the president’s restated opposition to gay marriage this week.

Two articles in the Daily Beast sum up the bizarre arguments from the left. The first, by Jesse Singal, insists that Obama actually “supports [gay marriage], but he doesn’t think he can afford to make this support public.” The second, by Michael Tomasky, argues “that Obama should not endorse gay marriage before the election, for various political reasons, mostly because the majority that supports same-sex marriage seems a little fragile.”

Both rationales, not surprisingly, were echoed by liberals across talk radio and television throughout the week, raising a pair of disturbing questions: 1) How could any liberal defend Obama’s current opposition to gay marriage? and 2) What’s so fundamentally immoral about such a defense?

The answer to the first question is related to the fact that in red-versus-blue America, many liberals are first and foremost Democrats, leading them to defend any position taken by a Democrat, no matter how illiberal.

We’ve been reminded of this constantly during Obama’s term, as the American Left is now dominated by those who will angrily chastise a Republican politician for advocating atrocious tax, trade, war and civil liberties policies and then cheerily praise a Democratic president for advocating the exact same policies, or worse. Essentially, many liberals are desperate to see liberalism in their president, even if it’s not there. And so on an issue such as gay marriage, Obama deftly plays to that vanity with terms like “evolve” — promising-but-meaningless words that prompt his base to insist that he has a stealth scheme to make gay marriage legal — and that any pressure to force his hand somehow undermines the overall cause.

That gets to the second question about morality. However pathetic it is for liberals to manufacture Nixon-esque “secret plan” sophistry to defend a president, it’s far worse for anyone to cite political considerations as reason to endorse Obama’s current opposition to equality.

To understand why it’s worse, simply exchange “African American rights” with “gay marriage” in Tomasky’s aforementioned sentence and then re-read it. Yes, your gut reaction is correct — in that context, the sentence suddenly seems not like measured advice from a pragmatic liberal, but like a totally unacceptable bigot-appeasing screed from a Jim Crow apologist trying to stop civil rights legislation a half century ago.

Ignored as it is, the forgotten triumph over such prejudice in the 1960s is instructive in today’s battle for equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. Though many Democratic partisans and Obama apparatchiks today may not want to admit it, civil rights laws didn’t originally pass because the American Left kept applauding politicians who said their positions were still “evolving.” They passed, in part, because activists set aside their partisan affinities and declared that such condescending propaganda was an intolerable excuse for inaction.

If history is any guide, the cause of equality today demands that same commitment to principle over party — even if it means making a Democratic president uncomfortable. Indeed, if Obama reverses course and endorses equality in his ABC News interview tonight, it will be because he was made sufficiently uncomfortable by civil rights activists, not because party-first sycophants praised his continued intransigence.

Nowhere, though, is the battle between the low-price/quantity business model and the higher-price/quality business model more clear than in the world of beer. In the fevered battle between the macrobrew behemoths and the craftbrew insurgents, both sides are digging in for an epic confrontation.

The history of the face-off is illustrative. For decades, the big brewers (Anheuser Busch, MillerCoors, etc.) have marketed their products less on the basis of taste or quality than on identity branding. What you drank subsequently became a statement not necessarily of what your taste buds enjoyed, but of your self-image. The Miller versus Budweiser wars and Old Milwaukee ads, for instance, were so often a pitch to guys looking for working-class street cred. Meanwhile, Pabst Blue Ribbon lately has been pitched as a retro-themed statement of hipster style.

This kind of marketing made a certain sense, because while macrobrew brands are certainly appealing, the actual beers in question are basically terrible. Produced through the macrobrews’ low-price, high-volume process, they don’t contain high-quality ingredients, they don’t contain much alcohol and, thus, they simply don’t taste good. Knowing this, the macrobrews have logically designed their marketing campaigns to focus on everything (the can, the type of people who drink it, the logo, etc.) but the actual product. Indeed, if there’s one ubiquitous reference that macrobrewing companies make to the beer itself, it’s usually one telling you how cold the beer is or should be — a temperature that, quite deliberately, helps hide just how bad the beer actually is.

The obvious assumption in this business model is that Americans generally reward low price over everything else, and specifically preference beer that is cost-effective to drink in mass quantities, rather than beer that delivers more alcohol or taste in less volume of liquid. In other words, the model assumes consumers see beer as a homogenized, undifferentiated commodity and that therefore less can never be more. In this view, more is always more, and since cheaper means more, cheaper is inherently better.

This is not a silly assumption, of course, in a country whose college binge-drinking culture teaches kids to prefer quantity at an early age. However, it ignored a potentially profitable market of beer drinkers with a different set of priorities. That’s where the craft brew industry came in.

In the last few years, small brewers have filled the vacuum left by macrobrewers, specifically marketing higher-priced products based on premium quality and taste. It’s been a wildly successful endeavor. 2011’s sales results tell that story: In a year that saw an overall decline in the beer market, the craft brewing industry increased its year-to-year sales by 15 percent and substantially grew its share of the total market. And here’s the key stat: according to the Brewer’s Association, “craft brewing sales share in 2011 was 5.7 percent (of the total beer market) by volume and 9.1 percent by dollars.”

That gap between share of total volume and share of total dollars generated is the high-price/high-quality/low-volume business model at work. Basically, craft brewers are generating a much larger share of beer revenue than they are contributing to the overall volume of beer in America — meaning that, contrary to previous trends, a growing share of consumers are willing to pay more for less, as long as the product is the comparatively higher-quality product that craft brewers provide.

Will this trend continue? Will the craft brew industry follow in, say, Apple’s footsteps and become the next high-quality David vanquishing the quantity-over-quality Goliath? It’s hard to say, but unlike in most other industries, the battle doesn’t look like it will be muddled by compromise — which makes it a hugely important test case.

Recall that in other major industries, the establishment’s low-price titans have typically tried to crush the high-price/high-quality upstarts by partially mimicking them — think Microsoft copying Apple or Wal-Mart partially pantomiming Whole Foods. In the beer industry, by contrast, it’s the opposite. Save for a few mini-brands like Coors’ Blue Moon line, which pretend to be a craft brew product, the macrobrew moguls are largely doubling down on their old low-price/low-quality/high-volume formula.

So, for example, Coors Light isn’t changing its watered-down product; it’s simply going with color-changing cans. Pabst is thinking about introducing not any higher-quality lines, but instead trying to brand its products to the military. And most blatantly, Miller has just launched this television campaign promoting a new can that allows the beer to be consumed as quickly as possible.

Though thinly veiled as a mechanism for better drinkability, the new “punch-top” can is obviously developed as the first specifically engineered to shotgun beer — that is, specifically designed to drink beer in a way that makes sure you don’t actually taste the beer. The unique selling proposition of the campaign is incredibly blatant in its embrace of the low-price/high-volume model: It is screaming at you to buy the cheap product exclusively because everything about it — the beer and even the can — is aimed at helping you pour it into your body without even having to taste or savor it. In this “punch top” innovation, Miller is effectively acknowledging that its customer base is those who drink only for volume — and it’s trying to thus convince more beer enthusiasts that speed drinking is a virtue.

The craft brewing industry, by contrast, is going in the opposite direction, trying to direct the beer-drinking population away from volume for volume’s sake. Visit a liquor store with a wide selection of microbrews and you’ll find an ever-more diverse selection of specialized offerings, from double IPAs to sour beers to barley wines. Notably, many of these products are sold in smaller sizes — four-packs or single pint-size bombers — making their price-per-ounce of beer far higher than the typical macrobrew. Additionally, what innovations the industry has made to beer technology tend to be fundamentally different from those of the macrobrew companies: They tend to be aimed at making the beer itself actually taste better (best example: Left Hand’s breakthrough creation of a bottled, widget-free milk stout on nitro).

In the competition for the future of drinking, both sides are obviously trying to exploit their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. The massive macrobrewing corporations are trying to take advantage of their size and corresponding ability to produce volume — all while playing down the fact that their beers have little local character or quality. The craft brewing industry, composed mostly of independent small and medium-size businesses, know they can’t compete in a volume game, and so they are trying to promote quality and diversity. It’s a straightforward fight — one that may seem only interesting to drinkers, but one that truly transcends the inebriation industry. It underscores both consumer shifts and questions about what kind of economy we want in the future.

Will we be a country of high volume and low quality? Or can we become an economy of quality and price premium? Whether it’s drinking, buying computers or choosing what industrial policy to support, we are in the process of answering those questions.

A Macrobrew Economy — a high-volume, low-price model — asks us to compete with other such economies throughout the world, and the problem is that countries like China will always have lower-priced labor, more lax environmental regulations and lower production standards to win a battle that rewards more and cheaper for more’s and cheaper’s sake. By contrast, a Craft Brew Economy — a high-quality, lower-volume model — is a different proposition. It follows the German model, which, as Time magazine notes, is all about being “committed to making the sort of high-quality, high-performance, innovative products for which the world will pay extra.”

The choice is ours — and it starts with the beer in your fridge.

When asked about this, Google argued that its provisions merely “enable us to give you the services you want – so if you decide to share a document with someone, or open it on a different device, you can.”

As reassuring as that seems, though, it’s not that simple when considered in a larger context.

In the last few years, major technology companies have become integral to interpersonal communication and information management. At the same time, many of these firms have tweaked user agreements in exactly the way Google has, helping the industry legally position itself for a mass intellectual property grab. That means whether you are using a photo-sharing site or a Web-based email account, you may have signed off on letting one of these corporations do whatever it wants with your data. As evidence of that reality, Facebook in 2009 let advertisers employ users’ uploaded photos to market products without users’ explicit approval.

Such a use unto itself may not offend you, but remember – that’s only what you can see. Indeed, nobody has any comprehensive idea of how tech companies are using these provisions in their secret business-to-business dealings. If they are already using your photos, what else are they doing behind their firewall? Are they selling your data? Are they mining your cloud files looking to preemptively appropriate the next great innovations? Nobody knows … well, except the tech companies themselves.

It’s easy to ignore such concerns by believing that the scope of a mass data mining operation is prohibitively large. But that’s not true. With the government already mining data from millions of Americans’ phone records in the name of fighting terrorism, it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that multibillion-dollar corporations can do the same.

Of course, companies providing these services assert that intellectual property is a substitute currency for cash. As the logic goes, even though online services cost money to create and maintain, you the user don’t have to pay actual cash for them because you are already paying in information about yourself, which technology companies then monetize.

That may seem at first like a good deal. But amid companies’ ever-intensifying pursuit of profit, the monetization process opens up the possibility for serious shenanigans. And here’s the worst part: If a company ultimately pilfers inventions or trade secrets or anything else from users, it will already be too late. Because we so quickly hit “agree” when we originally opened our accounts, we will have signed away any claim to what we believed to be ours and ours alone.

Left unexplored is why such a culture exists? That topic is avoided because it might make the violence seem like a symptom of something bigger rather than an isolated problem. That is, it might turn the mirror away from the game and onto its fans — in the process reflecting back the image of a violence-glorifying society that all-too-eagerly condones brutality as a matter of principle.

But after the first few weeks of the 2012 Stanley Cup playoffs, those deeper roots of hockey’s culture of violence can no longer be ignored. As USA Today reports, the post-season has been “marked by violence” with the league “suspend[ing] eight players…fin[ing] two and [holding] a hearing scheduled Friday for the Phoenix Coyotes’ Raffi Torres, who sent the Chicago Blackhawks’ Marian Hossa to the hospital Tuesday night with a crushing check.”

If this escalation was happening in a vacuum, it might be explained away as just a weird occurrence reflecting nothing more than one sport’s anomalous playoff year. But the real news in this trend is the fan response — and how the increase in violence has corresponded to a spike in fan support for the NHL. Indeed, rather than recoiling from this disturbing bedlam, the viewing public is rewarding the NHL with huge ratings.

“In the United States, TV ratings for hockey are up 50 percent for the NBC group of channels over this time last year,” reports the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Viewership is strong in Canada, with some in the broadcasting industry suggesting the very controversy over the spike in cheap-shots and thuggery may be pushing the ratings higher.”

These numbers tell the deeper story about what fuels the relationship between sport and violence. They tell the tale of how hockey’s culture of violence may be less an atavistic expression of the sport’s (supposedly) innate traditions than a market-driven response to consumer demand. As the Boston Globe’s Kevin Dupont put it: “There is blood on the NHL’s hands, and that appears to be very good business, at least for the moment.”

Looked at this way, concussions, injurious hits and fights are exactly what the blood-lusting audience desires — and so in a crowded professional sports business, hockey has simply become the most forthright in giving fans what they want.

Some NHL apologists would have us believe violence is so ingrained in hockey that reducing it would ruin the sport by effectively taking the game out of the game. But as the NHL’s own bruisers of the 1970s note, there were plenty of great years of hockey when there was far less violence — and, anyway, nobody’s talking about wholly eliminating physical contact from the game. Not even close. (Additionally, when it comes specifically to fighting, how can anyone really argue that stopping play so that opponents can punch each other is integral to the actual game itself?)

Other apologists insist that the current surge in violence isn’t worrisome because players allegedly don’t have a problem with it. As evidence of this, these voices often cite a recent Sports Illustrated poll showed hockey players opposing any ban on fighting.

“The fans love it, who pay the money,” said CBC hockey commentator and former coach Don Cherry in an emblematic jeremiad. “The players don’t seem to mind it, the coaches don’t seem to mind it, the players like it. So who is it who doesn’t like the fights and the banging around?”

The problem is that such sophistry ignores the financial incentives at work. Players see the NHL’s business model and their own financial future built around the current violence, and therefore have every incentive to keep quiet about concerns they might have. Citing their supposed support, then, is yet another way to try to end a much-needed conversation about violence before one begins.

The bright spot in all of this may end up being advertisers. As the Globe and Mail noted:

Only hours after Chicago Blackhawks forward Marian Hossa was carried off the ice on a stretcher following an ugly blindside hit, the NHL’s chief operating officer admitted the league is hearing from its business partners over the rash of suspensions and fines arising out of the on-ice antics, and the ensuing media coverage.

“They’re paying us a lot of money to associate with our brand,” said John Collins, who came to the NHL from the NFL. “So when our brand is under attack in the press on issues as serious as player safety, they want to know that the league is on top of it, and has a plan for dealing with it and hear the league articulate it.”

Last spring, when Sidney Crosby was still trying to recuperate from a persistent concussion and the Montreal Canadiens’ Max Pacioretty was stretchered off the ice after being knocked against a bare stanchion, companies such as Air Canada and Via Rail were outspoken in demanding change in the NHL.

Make no mistake about it: This kind of pressure comes not from any altruism on the part of multinational corporations, but from those corporations’ desire to preserve long-term profits. In that, they seem to be anticipating a future change in public attitudes about sports violence, and are trying to make sure their brands aren’t retroactively tarnished. They fear that their brands will be linked with the feelings of outrage expressed by one parent in his open letter to the league. Recounting his son’s enthusiasm for hockey, Wired’s Dave Banks wrote to NHL owners:

As the NHL season progressed, we’d occasionally see fights during games. As a kid, it’s tough to understand why grown men are punching each other with such ferocity over a game that he loves so much. He was confused. I tried to explain it to him, but I honestly didn’t have an answer that made a lot of sense. Excuses like, “It’s always been a part of the game” don’t hold a lot of water when cross-examined with the naked innocence of a 10-year-old kid.

Will such outrage become the norm? It’s hard to say because while corporate pressure might get NHL officials to do what they can to tone down the brutality, the culture in hockey will only change when the larger culture of violence in society changes. After all, that’s what NHL violence is an expression of — a society that has returned to the Roman Coliseum ethos of seeing violence as acceptable if not wholly entertaining. Bloodshed today is glorified in everything from international war policies to local “stand your ground” laws to movies to video games — and yes, to professional sports.

In a larger context, then, fan support for violence is completely unsurprising. In fact, it’s entirely predictable. And while we can tell ourselves hockey fans are particularly barbaric, and that hockey is just an exceptionally brutal game, the violence of the Stanley Cup playoffs — and the positive reaction to that violence — is really a mirror reflecting back a much more pervasive social pathology.

That’s where Kenneth Cole now comes in. The clothing designer has just launched a new crusade to tie his expensive clothing and shoes line to the elite’s movement du jour: the fight to demonize public schoolteachers and their unions. In a billboard and Web-based campaign, Cole’s foundation portrays the national debate over education as one that supposedly pits “Teachers’ Rights vs. Students’ Rights.”

“Should underperforming teachers be protected?” asks the foundation’s website.

When asked about the campaign, one of Cole’s spokeswomen insisted the company isn’t trying to insult teachers or unions, saying, “It’s something in the news and being debated, and we wanted to provide a forum where people could discuss it as well.” But with the company using the same loaded language as the conservative political activists trying to undermine public education and teachers’ unions, the corporate P.R.-speak is, to say the least, unconvincing.

No, Cole’s campaign is thinly veiled ideological propaganda, and it comes with myriad problems, not the least of which is the simple fact that almost nobody believes “underperforming teachers” should be protected. That includes the nation’s biggest teachers’ unions, which have been outspoken in backing “accountability” reforms for teacher tenure. So right off the bat, Cole is constructing a straw man, one that has served over the years to pretend that public employee unions in general and teachers’ unions specifically are about nothing more than making sure bad employees get to keep their jobs.

Of course, there is a legitimate debate among state lawmakers and school boards about how to determine what an “underperforming teacher” is. Should a teacher be considered subpar if her students perform poorly on standardized tests? Should any teacher-to-teacher peer review be included in performance evaluations? And should any factors other than tests and grades — say, student poverty levels — be considered when using student achievement to judge a particular teacher?

As evidenced by the language of his new campaign, Cole, like the anti-union activists in the larger corporate-sponsored education “reform” movement, doesn’t want those questions asked, much less answered, for pondering them raises the very queries about power and wealth that Cole’s fellow 1 percenters don’t want to discuss.

For instance, actually taking an honest look at America’s education system brings up queries about why other less economically stratified nations have unionized teachers and far better academic results than here in America. It also forces us to ask why it just so happens that wealthy unionized districts in America do so well — but poorer districts have such problems. All of that consequently compels us to consider issues like poverty and funding disparities between rich and poor districts — issues that inherently threaten the status quo, and thus the interests of the super-wealthy. And so under the veneer of the term “reform” and with the backing of seemingly altruistic philanthropy via foundations like Cole’s, the super-wealthy work to avoid substance and instead define the education policy discourse on reductionist slogans like “underperforming teachers.”

Perhaps the biggest problem with Cole’s campaign, though, is how it forwards the “us-versus-them” notion that teachers’ rights to due process in the workplace are automatically at odds with their students’ interests. This so fundamentally misunderstands how education works that it perfectly underscores why a clothing corporation doesn’t have much credibility on education issues.

Think about it: We need our best teachers to work in the public schools that educate the most at-risk populations. Why? Because with decades of social science research proving that achievement is driven mostly by out-of-classroom factors (poverty, family dysfunction, etc.), those are the schools that need the most skilled pedagogues to overcome comparatively difficult odds for success. But why would a good teacher opt to work in such a school without basic protections — protections designed to make sure the at-risk population’s achievement-suppressing disadvantages aren’t used as a rationale to fire her? She probably wouldn’t.

In this way, “Teachers’ Rights vs. Students’ Rights” is the mirror opposite of how things actually work. Without extending teachers’ rights to, say, be evaluated fairly or to challenge a termination, it would be difficult — if not impossible — for public schools to recruit the best teachers to the specific at-risk schools that need them the most.

Most likely, these inconvenient truths are of little concern to someone like Kenneth Cole. According to Gotham Schools, he sends his kids to private school, making him part of the larger trend of elites who are trying to foist radical policies onto public schools, knowing their own kin won’t be hurt by those policies.

But, you ask, wouldn’t a clothing mogul with no kids in public school be averse to a divisive crusade against teachers, if only to circumvent a controversy? Even if he is a political activist, wouldn’t he refrain from such a campaign for fear of losing customers?

These are fair questions, and they highlight how Cole’s campaign may say something hugely important — and troubling — about the long-term future of education politics in America.

Recall that Cole is in a zeitgeist industry that is all about lashing branded chic to the popular fad of the moment. That means his move probably reflects what he believes to be an ascendant cause célèbre — one that he thinks he isn’t joining in spite of his company, but in support of its profit-making objectives. Put another way, he probably believes he will gain customers if he ties his company to anti-teacher, anti-union themes.

Sure, that gamble could be wrong — and I hope it is. I hope America sees just how wrongheaded and ideologically extreme the crusade against public schools, teachers and unions is.

But as a successful mogul, Cole’s clearly got skill as a cultural seer; and if someone like him sees mass profit potential in not-so-subtly bashing teachers and unions, it’s a scary sign that such unhinged anti-teacher sentiment could be going more mainstream than ever.

Update: After a mass outcry from teachers, Kenneth Cole announced on Twitter Monday that it is removing the billboard. In its statement, the company said “We misrepresented the issue – one too complex for a billboard – and are taking it down.” It has also taken down the campaign on the accompanying website.