And they drank. They drank to wash down the slights they endured by day and to enlarge small lives which became heroic in alcohol-glazed rumination, … - Michael Nava

[Henry, to Rod] "Hell's not a place, Rod, it's something people do to each other."

The religious right is a counterrevolutionary movement whose purpose is to return society, and the individuals who make up society, to the social understanding and the roles that existed in the 1950s. In fact the religious right is a group of mail-order wizards and lobbyists tied to religious "media personalities" who spend millions to raise millions with the twin object of advancing their own social and political agendas and enriching themselves and their organizations. Acting out one's hatred of homosexuals is acceptable behaviour in the world of the religious right. Perpetrators of hate crimes against gays routinely cite religious reasons for their hatred of gays. Most of the hate mail we get cites religious justifications for the hate. The religious right rejects cultural pluralism and it rejects individualism. It sees its opponents not as fellow Americans presenting alternative views of what American society might look like; it sees them as conscripts in the army of Satan. The religious right aims to convert traditional principles of toleration and personal liberty to Bible-based precepts of "revealed" behaviour and comprehensive social order - "revealed", that is, to a few preachers and evangelists, and to their strategists, fund-raisers, and media advisers. There is no doubt that the evangelical attack on gay and lesbian rights is part of a broader strategy to impose specifically religious values on American politics and American bodies. Gays and lesbians make an ideal target for an evangelical coup because of the persistent fear and hatred of homosexuality in our culture. The Reverend Mel White bears important direct witness about the motives and purposes of his onetime associates: "These guys are not interested in biblical truth. They are only interested in proving through their interpretations of the text, their own prejudice." The religious right has discovered homosexuality as a marketing tool, and we may expect them to feature it, partly to intimidate homosexuals but principally to scare the freedom out of everyone. The aim of the religious right is to terrify people with the spectre of predatory homosexuality in order to assert control over public morality. Plainly, such an apocalyptic approach to social issues is principled in its unsusceptibility to reason and compromise, the basic tools of democracies; in this respect, the ideology of the religious right is profoundly antidemocratic. Such paranoic politics represent a grave danger to the Constitution and the society it informs.

"Come on, then," Gustavo said. "Let's get the circus started."