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The official story, the version anointed by mainstream media, suggests that at a time of war, economic turmoil, and suspended civil liberties, the US Presidential election of 2004 was decided on sexual and reproductive issues. John Kerry, a gay-tolerant, pro-choice quasi-Catholic, supposedly lost to George W. Bush, a gay-squeamish, anti-choice evangelical Protestant, because a majority of Americans oppose gay marriage and abortion.

On November 2, exit polls indicated that 22 percent of American voters, almost the same number who declared themselves evangelical Christians, preferred the "moral values" candidate. 79 percent of those voters chose Bush. But even if one assumes that everyone polled was telling the truth, and interprets the moral-values question as an unambiguously biased reference to gay marriage, abortion, and embryonic stem-cell research, these statistics hardly explain why Bush won 51 percent of the popular vote. The same spate of exit polls showed that 62 percent of voters support some form of legally recognized same-sex union.

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Eight years ago, exit polls suggested that 40 percent of the electorate gave moral values high priority in a race where Bill Clinton, a Democrat dubbed "the Weenie Wagger" by columnist Alexander Cockburn, trounced Bob Dole, a Republican given to denouncing Quentin Tarantino films as "nightmares of depravity."

A likelier determining factor in Bush's victory was fear. Every US Presidential campaign makes capital of ordinary citizens' dread of future peril, but in post-9/11 America, apprehension reigned supreme. It blared from Fox News and CNN, poured from the pulpits of churches, leapt from the pages of religious tracts like "The Future of the Middle East" ("...the time between now and the climax of the age at Armageddon is shorter with each passing day"). Basking in the role of "Commander in Chief," Bush played to a predisposition to view the world in Manichean terms. Told to choose between "them" or "us," many Americans picked "us" without reflecting on the fact that no one quite knows who "we" are.

Brother v. brother?

It is now commonplace to observe that in the so-called United States, cultural polarities are at their sharpest since the Civil War. In fact, the currently ubiquitous color-coded media model-- red state versus blue state-- echoes the split that occurred over slavery in the 1860s. Along the coastlines and below the Great Lakes, the Democrat-dominated blue states cover the most populous, most industrialized portions of country. Filling the Heartland, Republican red states are less populated, less cosmopolitan, more agrarian.

But the edges of that division are blurred, and neither side is monolithic. Centrist and left-of-center Americans often attribute the triumph of reactionary politics to the undifferentiated red-state Christian Right. In fact, the political underpinnings of the Christian fundamentalist movement are not necessarily fundamentalist or even Christian. The Moral Majority, the antecedent of contemporary evangelical activist groups, was essentially created by three Catholics-- Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and Terry Dolan, a gay man who died of AIDS-related illness in 1996-- and a Jew, Conservative Caucus founder Howard Phillips. It is doubtful that promotion of godliness is what these power brokers had foremost in mind.

Their goal was to promote cash. Their method was to exploit the frightened, obedient devout. Rank-and-file religious conservatives are typically middle-class dupes of greed-driven corporate forces. The contemporary corporate right, guided by neoconservative ideology and plain old-fashioned rapacity, uses theocratic Christianity as a guarantor of its power. The neoconservative movement is full of unbelievers, non-Christians, and casual Christians profoundly committed to a "free enterprise" system that fosters oligopoly and monopoly.

The Bush Presidential campaigns have been the most money-intensive in US history. Recent major donors to the Bush campaign or the Republican National Committee include top executives of Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, the Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston, American Airlines, Boeing, Viacom, Time Warner, MBNA Bank, and more than 500 other major corporations. Among the 2004 "Bush Rangers"-- donors of $200,000 or more-- was lobbyist Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition. Kenneth Lay, who presided over Enron's catastrophically sleazy business practices, was a key Bush supporter in 2001; about one-fifth of Bush's 2004 elite donors have been mired in corporate scandal.

The Bush family's deep involvement in Big Oil has brought forth gushers of money; administration officials with oil-company ties include Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and dozens more. There are also significant ties to tobacco interests. Favors granted in exchange for corporate support include tax cuts, job appointments, lifting of financial or environmental restrictions, and awarding of contracts, sometimes on a no-bid basis.

Disposable world

The Bush greedorama would fail without the cooperation of millions of US citizens who, in effect, have consented to be used and discarded. Some of that support comes from an almost childlike belief in a righteous America led by informed and competent officials.

A more troubling factor is growing belief in Endtime prophecy. The standard millennial end-of-the-world scenario, hatched in the 19th century, comes from passages in Daniel, Revelation, and other portions of the Old and New Testaments. Essential elements include the rise of the Antichrist; the onset of the Tribulation, a time of war, pestilence, and natural disaster; the arrival of the Rapture, in which true believers are beamed up to God; the battle of Armageddon, centered in the Middle East; and the Second Coming of Christ.

The Endtime world picture was encapsulated by James Watt, Ronald Reagan's born-again Secretary of the Interior, who said, when asked about his commitment to preserving the environment for future generations, "I don't how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns." Alongside a grab-it-while-you-can approach to amassing wealth, there exists a notion that the Lord is nigh. For some in positions of power, science and statecraft are trumped by the need to embrace the apocalypse and, perhaps, help it along.

The American tension between faith and reason is hardly new. In the 18th century, the evangelical Great Awakening ran parallel to the Enlightenment. Religious and secular strains intersect in a sense of mission, in the feeling that America constitutes a grand experiment presenting an example to the world. In the 17th century, John Winthrop warned that if the American example, standing "as a city upon a hill," should be implemented falsely, "We shall be made a story and a byword through all the world."

As the nation embarks on four more years in the grip of a Messianic sociopath abetted by the worst and the dimmest, America is indeed a story and a byword across the planet. Bush, a man who operates beyond the reach of reality-checks, is the perfect overseer for a dumbed-down, hyped-up age where deception rules. Bush and his underlings live on lies. Mendacity is to them what water is to plankton.

A chador for truth

The Bush Administration is assured of public blindness to its ethical deformities because it largely operates in secrecy, leaving Americans to get their information from corporate broadcast sources. When facts are withheld, debate is stifled, and public discourse becomes mush, the informed consent that shapes democracy cannot exist.

Thanks to Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch's Fox News-- all propaganda all the time-- many Americans actually believe there is a high-minded basis for the Iraq war. Thuggish pseudo-punditry from Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Ann Coulter clogs the airwaves. Congressional hearings on televised sex and violence come and go, but there never has been and probably never will be a hearing on the stupidity that is the essence of commercial television, and perhaps its point.

The US corporate media generate a virtual reality where facts are not true. One stock distortion is the portrayal of Massachusetts, John Kerry's home state, as a hotbed of pinko laxity encouraged by "activist judges." Massachusetts is the first state, Senator Kerry's disapproval notwithstanding, to embrace gay marriage, but marriage is an inherently conservative construct. It's hardly surprising that same-sex marriage should first take root in a bastion of rectitude with a Mormon Republican governor-- a "pro-family" state that has, according to the US Census Bureau, one of the lowest divorce rates in the nation. In Boston, where more than 400 same-sex couples have married, most sexually-oriented businesses have been run out of town; gay men from the Bay State seek recreational sex in Rhode Island. Contrary to the state's soft-on-crime media image, the Massachusetts justice system is dominated by a punitive prosecutorial subculture whose tone is set by Boston College Law School, where Jesuit authoritarianism fuses with Orwellian feminist erotophobia.

The "liberal" authoritarian strain thrives on running to Daddy, begging protection from the neighborhood sex-offender, leftover smoke, and scores of other bits of nastiness, real or imagined. It means handing the patriarchy more legal power in order to bully everyone into propriety. In fostering a nanny government, the left has inadvertently joined forces with the right to end freedom in America. This is one of the reasons why so many of John Kerry's positions seem to emanate from Bush World.

The Tweedles, Dum & Dee

Especially disturbing is Kerry's endorsement of unprecedented Presidential war powers, the right of Team America, World Police, to wage "preemptive" war. The Iraq war-- an act of piracy founded on lies-- provides proof to the world that the United States is an outlaw state unfettered by principle or reason. The cost in human lives means little to Bush, the "compassionate conservative" who approaches war with the same disregard for human life he demonstrated when, as Governor of Texas, he cheerfully presided over a record number of executions.

Bush's contempt for and defiance of the United Nations surprised no one familiar with his ideological roots; the UN has been demonized by the right since its inception. Secularly grounded far-right groups like the John Birch Society view the international body as the fruit of a conspiracy for global domination. Many Christians see it as a possible basis (the European Union is another) for the one-world government of the Antichrist. In Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels, the Antichrist is, in fact, the Secretary General of the UN. One longstanding right-wing objective is to insure that no international organization should have any authority over the United States in any area. In other words, treaties that require the US to abide by certain rules should be ignored.

This idea is non-controversial among an electorate that lacks the knowledge that used to be imparted in ninth-grade Civics. Despite its pro-educational pieties, the Bush Administration aids the decay of American literacy and general knowledge. Ignorance is its power base. Its education schemes mostly facilitate Federal meddling in public schools. The underfunded fraud that is the No Child Left Behind program calls for a review of science curricula in all states during the next two years. The object of scrutiny will be ideology, not science. In 2004, there were challenges to the teaching of evolution in 13 states. More are pending. Meanwhile, "abstinence-only" sex education programs pushed by Bushies are spreading the notions that HIV can be spread through tears and sweat, or that masturbation causes pregnancy.

Lurking in Bushtopia are those who would eliminate public education altogether. Much opposition to public education has come from the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal sect in America. As a dedicated member of the Assemblies of God, outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft-- chief perpetrator and enforcer of the Constitution-gutting USA Patriot Act-- partakes of the fear that secular humanist teachers are out to corrupt America's young. Since he also believes in Endtime prophecy, Ashcroft may have seen himself as a warrior fighting the minions of the Antichrist.

Target: gay sex

It is hard to imagine a worse Attorney General, but Bush may have found one in Ashcroft's designated successor. If Alberto Gonzales's appointment is confirmed, the chief US law enforcement official will be a man who has provided rationales for violating international law, the Geneva Conventions, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, federal law, and the US Constitution. As White House Counsel, Gonzales cooked up sophistries to justify War-on-Terror gulags at Guantanomo and elsewhere, and the use of torture. There is speculation that Gonzales, a Cuban-American Catholic with impeccable right-wing credentials, may later be launched into the Supreme Court alongside fanatically anti-choice Antonin Scalia, who in turn may become the next Chief Justice.

Overturning Roe v. Wade, which is predicated on the idea that a constitutional right to privacy is inherent in the First Amendment, could help pave the way for overturning Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court decision that voided sodomy laws nationwide and negated Bowers v. Hardwick. As long as the Bush Administration has no commitment to the US Constitution's Bill of Rights, let alone recent court interpretations of its contents, the rights of all Americans remain in jeopardy.

In September 2004, the US Commission on Civil Rights issued a report characterized by the New York Times as "a scathing 166-page assessment of an administration that has, at best, neglected core civil rights issues." It summarizes Bush Administration efforts to negate affirmative action, lock voters out of the electoral process, and undermine separation of church and state. The document notes that despite Bush's use of civil-rights jargon to sell his agenda, his civil rights record is nil. Most of Bush's civil-rights references pertain to "faith-based initiatives."

Fuck-the-poor policies abound and are metastasizing into a doctrine of fuck-the-middle-class. Running up a staggering deficit may be a deliberate effort to render Social Security, Medicare-- any program Bush would never dare attempt to axe through legislation-- unaffordable. Once "privatizing" these and other social programs becomes a necessity, they will be transformed into corporate gravy trains.

As Bush prepares for his second term, the entrenchment of political advisor Karl Rove insures that an end-justifies-the-means approach to government will continue. Dick Cheney will go on pulling strings behind the throne. The office of Secretary of State, in passing from Colin Powell to Condoleezza Rice, moves from a troubled figure with diplomatic skills to one who gets ahead by pleasing her boss. The abiding presence of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provides assurance that the administration will never admit a mistake. FCC censors fight "indecency" with recharged zeal; CIA employees "disloyal" to the administration are being purged.

As former Nixon counsel John Dean states in Worse Than Watergate (2004), the Bush regime is "truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous." It is, in fact, the most dangerous Presidential administration is US history.

Dwelling on home & hearth

While Bush runs amok, gay activists remain commendably attentive to issues such as domestic partnership, AIDS research, and discrimination. Gay and lesbian individuals and organizations have made progress-- most importantly, perhaps, in overturning sodomy laws. Although 11 states have just passed ballot initiatives banning gay marriage, domestic partnership arrangements exist in Maine, New Jersey, Delaware, California, Hawaii, and Vermont-- and marriage, for those who want it, is available in Massachusetts.

But marriage equality, the right of access to a flawed heterosexual institution, seems a strange civil-rights priority at a time when the rights of every US citizen are under siege. This lack of awareness may be due in part to a parochial focus on gay issues. Hordes of gay men and lesbians can be counted upon to help lynch Dr. Laura, but the need to stand up to the USA Patriot Act is a harder sell. For gay activists, a greater commitment to the community at large might be productive. Too often the response of politically engaged gay men and lesbians to their opposition is to shut down debate, pull the plug, make an exit in high moral dudgeon.

Activists mired in dimestore Marxism, self-help lore, and postmodern philosophical affectation appear to have forgotten that the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly form the cornerstone of the gay and feminist movements. The elevation of "hate speech" to proscribable offense has led to bans on Huckleberry Finn and efforts to brand all criticism of religious groups as actionable acts of bigotry; "hate crime" laws make thought-crime an unprecedentedly palatable concept.

"The First Amendment belongs in the 18th century, when it was written," said feminist sociologist Gail Dines, addressing Boston University students in 1992. Many denizens of Bushtopia would agree. In the 21st century, when American moral values include arrogance, fraud, avarice, cruelty, environmental destruction, limitless detention, and mass killing, hardly anyone seems to remember what was in the Bill of Rights.