Thirteen states (so far) get so put off by photos of bearded men locked in wedding kisses way off in far San Francisco that they ban health-care benefits, hospital visitation rights, and all other "incidents of civil marriage" for gay partners. Meanwhile, back in sunny pool-side Sodom, Ricky Martin, cross-over entertainer at the last Bush inaugural and one gorgeous male hussy, wants to have kids -- lots of 'em. With a woman!

Wait, it gets better.

Did I mention the Supremes? Three Supreme Court slots are up for grabs. This means that 40 years into the future, the reverberations of these brief four years will make the Bush victory (as the phobes used to say of AIDS) "the gift that keeps on giving."

And yet, if history and Maya Angelou are any judge, still we will rise. See, there's a funny thing about brewing up bitterness and bile. It has a way of boiling over and scalding the real witches stirring the cauldron, the ones dressed as Puritans.

Already we see some old-fashion karma coming down: Think -- oh joy unforeseen! -- of the white-hot spotlight that's been cast on the House of Cheney. Even the Left-Behind crowd has figured out that there's something about Mary.

And now that the Vice President's daughter is recognized as the most bashful lesbian in America, despite the many verbal bouquets to her health and sanity heard at the presidential debates (from, oddly, only the V.P.'s opponents), I wonder if the emails and religious tracts are pouring in yet at the Cheney compound.

The ones from the snake-handlers and anti-evolutionists living on the fever line, not the Republican base, but the inner core of the base, those fax-sending, Congress-phoning lunatics that the party operatives mobilized -- so craftily! and with such straight faces! -- around just this issue, gay people and their equal status under the law -- equal status under the law being what the largely symbolic fight over gay marriage is really about.

The Cheney emails I am imagining are nestled in the soft, West Virginia cadences of the caring Christian. "I have a message I want to share with you." Okay. "Your family is in our prayers." Sounds good. "Have you heard the Good News?" Oh-oh! With a darkening of the sky, the email rumbles out chapter-and-verse, flashes the fake-science of Dr. James Dobson and his Focus on the Family ministries, shares finally, breathlessly "the good news" that "homosexuality is a lie."

While many lies do walk this land with pious tread, homosexuality is not one of them. In fact, battles with human nature never end well. Challengers often wind up disgraced by what can only be called the Revenge of Irony:

Last September, for instance, Virginia Congressman Ed Schrock became the latest casualty to fall on his sword. He resigned "after much thought and prayer" when an activist website linked to a tape of the 63-year-old chatting up the boys on a hookup line. "Just get naked, play, and see what happens," he is heard saying after requesting the entire Speedo catalogue of porn-star attributes ("flat stomach, good chest, good arms, well-hung . . . ") And, oh yeah, must be discrete. Schrock, after all, had a day job co-sponsoring the Federal Marriage Amendment, urging the renewal of a military ban on gays (he worried, he said, about the communal showers) and quashing health-care benefits for the domestic partners of D.C. city-workers.

But that was before the Congressman retreated into a muchness of thought and prayer. And if any candor cut into that congealed murk, it must have blazed across the darkness with the brilliant eye-opener that Schrock, like many a Salem hanging judge, totally loved the sin, but hated the sinner. Today the upright Virginian has been disappeared from the Christian Coalition website where his glowing "high profile" bio now returns the cold thud of a "Page Not Found." Thus, and not for the first time, justice is cruelly sated in the Theater of the Absurd that is right-wing politics. The "exemplary" life of an anti-sex demagogue has played out in public, and the same moral rings clear: It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.

Still I wonder how far these Republicans will go with this gay canard. Will the V.P., who up until now has never failed to support his daughter (quietly perhaps but solidly), be persuaded by those same operatives with the straight faces that party loyalty demands sacrifice, that stoking the backwoods backlash will open a vista of Republican wins from here to the Rapture? Imagine being treated one morning to the CNN spectacle of our Mary, in heels and a snappy blazer, getting tossed out of the Cheneys' famous "undisclosed location" in leafy Georgetown, father barring the door with arms crossed, decreeing, as in a Victorian lithograph, "Daughter, you must choose! Either a Life of Sin. Or the Life Everlasting!"

Ah, how the press will scramble! How those long, vicious lenses will poke into the limousine window as our star speeds away, to be greeted by a new batch of microphones and cameras when she arrives at one of those lock-down facilities in the Rocky Mountains or the Appalachians -- doomed, debunked ex-Gay "ministries" with Orwellian names like "Love Won Out" or "Love in Action," -- there to turn to Wolf Blitzer, weeping, and be officially photographed as "repentant," leaving the world behind (at least for a weekend) in order to, in the words of Dr. Dobson, "pray away the gay." Be assured, a miracle will take place in that campground facility. To the marrow of her spine, Mary Cheney is nothing if not a political daughter, schooled thoroughly in right-wing theater.

Yes, this golden-haired actress is the same Mary Cheney who has been a professional lesbian since college graduation -- not merely a lesbian who is a professional, mind you, but a professional who leveraged all her adorable lesbianism: Mary Cheney, as the one public homosexual on the Coors payroll, went to gay bars with Mr. International Leather and urged the barkeeps to end their boycott of Coors beer, the Coors family being, as it remains today, a corporate sponsor of the most hideous gay-hysteria legislation in Colorado.

It is a dark dream I dream of Mary, but these are dark times. And the fire and brimstone is all on the other side. What to do, what to do. Knowledge is power, and so I have a suggestion.

Two, in fact.

© 2004 Nightcharm, Inc. and John Caliendo.
Plastic male doll: Photography by Shirin Kouladjie © 2002. Opening graphic: David K.