In contemporary lore, the good people of the red states walk in Jesus's sandals while the rest of us are following Satan into the licking flames. Twenty-plus years of conservative propaganda have convinced millions of Republicans and their pet Beltway pundits that they inherited the legacy of frontier values and dwell in baptismal light, unlike modern Democrats, who crawled out from under rocks and prefer the ambiguous dark, where there's no right or wrong, only "personal choices." [#image: /photos/54cbfbd8932c5f781b3952c4]Newt Gingrich once spouted that Susan Smith's murder of her two children in 1994 was a sign of the evil that liberal Democrats had wrought: "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things.... The only way you get change is to vote Republican." According to the gospel of Saint Newt, William J. Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and similar blowholes, the dying raptures of Sodom and Gomorrah can be found in the cultural duchies of the blue states. Here sin and moral sloth have set up shop, and venereal outbreaks of trendy ideas go unchecked. Conservative pundits and politicians regularly jeer that these Jurassic Parks of geriatric do-gooders and brainwashed college students don't represent the "real" America—the God-fearing, flag-waving, decent-living, high-octane, steeped-in-common-sense, everyday-low-prices heartland. Yet even as blue states hug the coasts and red states spread like a bloodstain across America's outstretched body, the influence of these elitist enclaves remains pervasive, corrosive, rotting away the pillars of moral order and foisting abortion, divorce, pornography, gay marriage, snail-darter environmentalism, secular humanism, dovish appeasement, moral relativism, and Rosie O'Donnell's TV comeback upon a once virile nation. The very names of the enclaves breeding such bacteria make the nostril hairs quiver. Hollywood. Berkeley. San Francisco. Madison, Wisconsin. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Martha's Vineyard. Georgetown. And, worst of all, New York City, especially Manhattan, most especially its Upper West Side, disparaged by its critics as the outpatient clinic for last-gasp liberalism.

It's so unjust.

As a resident of the Upper West Side and a regular bus rider, I must protest that the truth has been perverted and inverted. Yes, the Upper West Side is liberal, socially conscious, multi-culti, gay-friendly (Rosie's brother Daniel—also gay—is our state assemblyman), and occasionally itchy with political correctness. And, yes, it's true that we care, perhaps care too much, rattling our Zabar's bags as we nag the nation's conscience to no avail. Really, though, such little harm we do, what unracy lives we lead. It's like Jewish-Hispanic-Amish country up here! The broad sidewalks present a wholesome cavalcade of baby strollers, Columbia University students, diabetics on canes, and tourists posing in front of Tom's Restaurant, the diner made famous on Seinfeld. It isn't the cultural bastions of the blue states such as the Upper West Side that are greasing America's slide into the disco inferno. It's the Republican red states that are lowering the country's moral standards and dragging us through muck and malaise, the red states that are pustulating with horny hypocrites, rampant crime, polygamy, crystal-meth labs, federal handouts (The Economist recently christened Alaska "America's welfare state"), illegitimate births, blimping waistlines, and future generations of dumb bunnies. JonBenet Ramsey, dolled up and immortalized in her beauty-pageant footage, is the pre-pubescent red-hot-mama mascot of red-state Babylon.

"Red States cling to double standards like a drunk holds on to the last beer he can afford," writes Justin Cord Hayes in the semi-humorous survival guide Blue State/Red State. Hypocrisy is the hallmark of the red-state bull-roarer. Gingrich, who makes Hayes's dishonor roll of "conservative scalawags," has been married three times and has been known to have problems keeping it zipped. Limbaugh has three marriages in the loss column. He is also a prancing Tartuffe on the drug issue, condemning addicts and users on his radio show for their weak wills and moral failings (and wanting to chuck them behind bars), only to be revealed as a painkiller anteater himself. Bennett expended volumes of wind preaching virtue and decrying seamy decadence, only to be exposed as a high-stakes slot-machine love monkey. But these are minor-league hypocrisies, as much a by-product of male prerogative as of Republican humbug. It is at the extremes that the red-state double standards are most sharply defined.

For the purposes of lurid illustration, no one is a better, more bitter distillation of red-state double standards than Dennis Rader, the monster who achieved lethal renown in Wichita, Kansas, and across the nation as the "BTK" killer (BTK: Bind, Torture, Kill). Convicted and sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms after a reign of terror that lasted decades, Rader was a methodical sadist, murdering his victims as if staging his own theater of cruelty, a Black Mass of the sacred and profane. The Los Angeles Times reported, "After killing neighbor Marine Hedge in 1985, Rader took her body to his church and photographed it on the altar. Then he hid her body, changed into his Scouting uniform and went off to chaperon a camping trip." [#image: /photos/54cbfbd83c894ccb27c7ee88]It was the Scout-leader uniform and the other trappings of patriarchal authority that enabled him to blend into the community, elude suspicion. He played the role of respectability to the hilt. Rader was not only a Scout leader but also an officer at Wichita's Christ Lutheran Church and a registered Republican—a psychopathic parody of the Upstanding Citizen. Because he fit so well the stereotype of how a pillar of the community should conduct himself in daylight, his church congregation didn't have a collective clue. ("Nobody, nobody saw this coming," said the Reverend Michael G. Clark, the church's pastor, regarding Rader's arrest.) On the outside he couldn't have been more conformist; inside, he was an icebox of finely chiseled rage. Rader is the nightmare embodiment of the red-state personality at its most self-conflicted: piously Christian (he quoted the Bible at his sentencing hearing), yet torturously punitive; arrogantly proud, yet sloppily maudlin ("I've humbled myself," he blubbed at the same hearing); dotingly paternal (Time: "Rader was known as an attentive father who used to take his kids camping and fishing"), and a petty despot (as a compliance officer in his Wichita suburb, Rader was known to measure grass with a ruler and give citations for unkempt lawns).