Lott was trying to escalate a rhetorical war on homosexuality, the battle was joined some time ago here in South Carolina. In an election year when there is little economic discontent, the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, brought new focus to the politics of morality when he declared in a television interview in June that homosexuality is a sin. For more than two years, leaders of this state's churches, governments and schools have erected barrier after barrier against what many view as a cultural invasion that offends cherished values. These days, with increasing vigor, the resistance to change extends to another perceived threat: homosexuality. It is a place where lawmakers still scoff at suggestions that the Confederate battle flag be removed from the Capitol dome and where only a Federal court order enabled women to enroll at the Citadel.
It was not by accident that the first shot of the Civil War was fired in this tradition-bound state, where few things are viewed so seriously as an assault on the inherited culture.
