J'accuse.

A political decision was made some 20 years ago by a right-wing money-raiser and political operator, Richard Viguerie, that henceforth the far fight would not only raise vast sums of money, which they had been doing from tax-flee "church" donations and foundations, but they must now use that money effectively to defeat any politician who might not sufficiently worship flag and fetus, in whose sign they mean to conquer.

Despite millions of dollars raised and spent, these subversives failed to capture the House of Representatives until 1994, when, thanks to President's Clinton's political ineptitude, they were able to shift enough of the flat rocks of the republic to provide the Republican Party with a truly weird, squirming majority of nonrepresentative (let us hope) representatives. Meanwhile, according to the Viguerie blueprint of 1979, they are careful to avoid actual politics (there is, as yet, no foreseeable majority to repeal the 13th Amendment) in favor of what they call "hot buttons," which means sex and drugs or both. Just press the hot button, and you can destroy your opponent by revealing his sex life, real or imagined--it makes no difference if you have the hard-soft cash to buy time for a TV ad or to finance something like Gary Bauer's Family Research Council, where gays are compassionately demonized for having made a "a bad choice" in the cafeteria of sexual delights when, with a bit of therapy or prayer, they could change and become as wretched as those sad straights, half of whom are doomed to undergo divorce, battles over child custody, and charges of overpopulating the planet (if only from me) while glumly submitting, if in office--if oval-shaped--to the eager, if incompetent (the navy blue dress!), blow jobs from crazed fans.

This year's hot button, impeachment, is now too hot for even Newt G. to press, at least preelection. That leaves the children of mud only the fag villain, a permanent fixture in the America psyche, where every. eve is Halloween.

The tragedy in Wyoming has now cast a bright light on the Christian right. Predictably, liberals have wrung their hands. But easily the most chilling sight in years on TV was Wyoming's hard-eyed governor, Jim Geringer, saying that he hoped "we would not use Matt to further our agenda [sic]." But we must further one if good is ever to come from the ooze and the slime where Matt's death came from.

I propose a class action of interested and concerned organizations and individuals. Since it is bad law that has made our republic so safe a place for hate to fester in, I suggest that only at law can there be the war they want and a victory that a sane society must win. Sen. Trent Lott recently denounced homosexuality as an illness akin to "alcoholism and kleptomania" (two popular pastimes of Congress). Simultaneously Bauer's Family Research Council began its hate-campaign ads on TV, condemning those men and women who made "bad choices" sexually, as if choice were any more involved than the color of one's eyes or the degree of mental sickness--or crass opportunism--as expressed by Lott and Bauer.

I believe that as the highest-ranking member of the U.S. Senate, Mr. Lott should be charged with incitement to violence and to murder, specifically in the case of Matthew Shepard, and that Mr. Bauer and others who have indulged in the same reckless demonizing of millions of Americans be equally charged.

Amnesty International recently reported that the United States is the most barbarous of first-world countries in the treatment of its citizens by its government. If so, then the Tree of Liberty ... I trust that all of you know the rest of Mr. Jefferson's sentence.

Vidal is the best-selling author of Myra Breckinridge, The City and the Pillar, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, and Palimpsest, among many others titles.