Now that 11 states have voted by overwhelming margins for amendments to their state consitutions to ban gay marriage — Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Montana, Utah, Ohio, Michigan and Oregon — lending huge support to seven other states that already define marriage as exclusively heterosexual, will we soon be seeing "no-go zones" for gays?

If you think that's far fetched, think about how far the lunatic fringe, now the right-wing majority, has come — and how far it believes its mandate from the election goes. For one thing, efforts to institute a federal ban may be on the not too distant horizon. "With five new Republican senators elected Tuesday, opponents of same-sex marriage maintain, an amendment to the U.S. Constitution could be introduced and conceivably passed as soon as the next congressional session," Elizabeth Mehren reports.

(Image by Mort Subiet.)

"Now comes the revolution," the influential, far-right conservative Richard Viguerie tells reporter David D. Kirkpatrick. "If you don't implement a conservative agenda now, when do you?" Viguerie, he reports, wrote in a memorandum to conservative leaders: "Make no mistake — conservative Christians and 'values voters' won this election for George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress. It's crucial that the Republican leadership not forget this — as much as some will try."

Kirkpatrick reports that Christian conservatives — who, don't forget, turned the election into a rout in the popular vote for the Ignoramus in Chief — believe the nation is "on the verge of self-destruction" because it lacks traditional family values, according to James C. Dobson, an evangelical Christian who founded Focus on the Family. With the election of the Ignoramus to a second term, "God has given us a reprieve," Dobson says. "But I believe it is a short reprieve."

Think about this: These right-wing Christian conservatives believe they have just four years to ban gay marriage, stop abortion and embryonic stem-cell research, and, above all, give the U.S. Supreme Court a complete makeover so as to overturn Roe v. Wade.