To get a handle on what's going on you need to listen to talk radio, to the drive-by way the Rushes and the Seans say "liberal" now. It used to be right-wing code for "communist;" lately it's taken on a second meaning: "queer."

"Latte liberal," "effete liberal" all play perfectly to a hate stereotype of gay men as ineffectual twits, with over-privileged lives, overheated educations, big-city addresses and a reflexive anti-Heartland snobbery. You can hear this same falsetto note being struck when the heinous but (damn her eyes!) hilarious Ann Coulter says she's voting for Bush because "even after three consecutive best-sellers I'm still not rich enough to be a liberal." These are the rigged-up straw men the right likes to fight in an effort to delegitimize primarily Democrats, but also gay men and women.

It's an old right-wing strategy. "Traditionalists on the Right have always actively opposed increasing levels of legal equality -- first for African Americans, then for women, and now for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people," writes R. Claire Snyder, a professor of political theory at George Mason University, in her forthcoming book The Case for Gay Marriage. "The Old Right explicitly supported white supremacy at a time when it was socially acceptable to publicly denigrate African-Americans and claimed that racial equality would destroy the American way of life. It vehemently opposed the Supreme Court’s principled ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, accused the justices of legislating from the bench, and mobilized one of the largest grassroots campaigns in U.S. history to attack all attempts to enact racial equality."

Yes, we've seen this movie before but this time we're Rosemary's Baby. The right-wing bullies want us to be the devils they can repel with their crosses. Ain't gonna happen, of course; silence still equals death. But the impossibility of putting Jack back in the box is exactly what the Republicans are counting on: An issue to mobilize the base that stays forever an issue, that can never be resolved. Now it takes the form of gay marriage; before that it was gays in the military; before that, gays in the classroom. It's the perfect smoke-and-mirrors distraction.

The book that explains exactly how this sick trick works is What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank, the hottest political read of the year and -- surprise -- a fun time. (It's also my first recommendation in the Knowledge Is Power department.)

Kansas has the poorest rust-belt counties in America, and all of them vote hard right. The more poor, unemployed and ill-educated the area, the more likely it is to cut taxes for the rich and, as a direct result, eliminate services for its own blighted citizens. In the Heartland, pissed-off blue-collar workers no longer bruise for a fight with management or clamor after healthcare and Social Security protection. Their strange, new, counter-intuitive brand of populism prefers to vote its morals rather than its pocketbook.

If you thought America was a nation of self-interested capitalists, you were wrong, pal. Out in Backlash County as Frank (who is from Kansas) calls the Red States, people are altruists. Except their "altruism" is poison to us. They want a righteous nation, a Christian nation, a nation purged of high-handed liberals, and so, while the car sits on its wheel axles in the front yard and the youngest child has a cough she just can't shake, they vote to send a message to the abortion doctors, the queers in Hollywood, the New York Times.

"The leaders of the backlash," writes Frank, "the same canny people, remember, who are responsible for such masterpieces as the Florida 2000 election result . . . have chosen to wage cultural battles where victory is impossible, where their followers' feeling of powerlessness will be dramatized and their alienation aggravated." Abortion, Frank observes, is never halted; affirmative action is never abolished; the networks are never forced to clean up their acts. "As culture war, the backlash was born to lose. Its goal is not to win cultural battles but to take offense, conspicuously, vocally, even flamboyantly. Indignation is the great aesthetic principle . . . what the guitar solo is to heavy metal . . . Conservatives often speak of their first bout of indignation as a sort of conversion experience."

Understand, we are not dealing with homophobia here. Red Staters do not "fear" gay men and women, as the term supposes. What's actually going on is a deeply automatic disgust with gay coupling, particularly that between cherubic men hugging rose bouquets and each other on the A. P. wire. It is this that fuels the fire, and it is gay males in particular that make the right-wingers go right off the charts. I suspect if the issue were strictly lesbian marriage (which, interestingly, it sort of is, with 75% of same-sex licenses in Vermont issued to women, 71% in Portland, and 57% in San Francisco...more statistics here), the anger would not spark the way it does.

We would not hear Rick Santorum blow windily about the fall of Rome on the Senate Floor. The devout senator frequently worries about civilization collapsing under the weight of gay rights (as when he infamously told a reporter that the decriminalizing of sodomy by the Supreme Court might lead to the sanctioning of "man on dog" sex.) A flair for the kitsch never fails the good senator. And so it is Rome of late -- all that gorgeous marble and gold toppling down at the feet of two eunuchs kissing! Still, I was dismayed that Santorum -- a grandson of Italy, like myself -- could voice such staggering ignorance of Roman history.

Had he no uncles making wine in the cellar while they held the children spellbound with tales of the legions on the march? No, Rick, it wasn't homosexuality that smashed Rome. Affairs between men and boys were commonplace in the Mediterranean world even as Romulus and Remus took their first suckle off that famously big-hearted, many-teated she-wolf. Rome was in her glory, not decline, when the Emperor Hadrian went around naming towns after a sensational boy-toy who, as beautiful boys will, had gotten hammered one night and drowned in the Nile.

It was the arrival of the Christians -- O Rick Sactimonium! -- that coincides with the fall of Rome. But here we will be more honest than the anti-gay apologists, who never admit to a qualifying corollary: The Christians didn't bring about the fall of Rome either. It was overextended empire, mismanaged provinces, runaway greed, taxes that sent farmers into penury, and a paranoid military that elected (then assassinated) puppet emperors. It was incompetence at the top (remind you of anything?) that emptied the culture of civic meaning and caused the educated class to clutch onto a religion of slaves, a religion that inverted Rome's triumphalist worldview of soaring aqueducts and swooping war eagles. Christianity -- then still close to its source -- preached of lowered expectations, of rewards in the next world, of suffering which, rather than a sign of displeasure from Olympus, was the measure of a mystical oneness with its crucified, uniquely bloodied god.

But then government got into the game, basilicas got built, emperors morphed into popes, and the faith of slaves became big business, more accustomed to meting out punishment than enduring it. Which brings us to my second recommendation . . .

© 2004 Nightcharm, Inc. and John Caliendo.