I believe that you need to be flexible in deciding who to exchange links with. At least for now, Google doesn't seem to care how related your site is to your link patners'. At least I can't see any evidence of this in the rankings. And if Google ever does place an emphasis on theming, I believe that the worst case scenario is that an unrelated link will be given less weight or simply ignored. I don't think a penalty of any kind will be involved.
My experience has been that a link from almost any non-penalized site is worthwhile, for targeted traffic as well as ranking, as long as you use your target keywords in the anchor text and a very accurate and useful description. An obvious exception would be a link or or from an adult site.
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