THE traditional way to influence the governor of Georgia, insiders say, is to enlist the boss of the power company or a big bank. In the case of the state “religious-liberty” bill passed last month, the lobbyists were more eclectic but equally effective. The bill would have allowed faith-based groups to withhold services, or to hire and fire, on grounds of religious belief; its opponents included Disney, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines and the National Football League. Nathan Deal, the Republican governor, vetoed it. For Mr Deal, though, the trial of reconciling alarmed moderates and a legislature controlled by doctrinaire members of his party isn’t over: he must also decide on a measure that would let students carry concealed guns on campus.

The brief legislative session, laments Vincent Fort, a Democratic state senator, was wastefully devoted to “God, guns and gays”. Nor is Georgia’s the only southern legislature that, this year, has gratified hardliners at the cost of wider outrage. In March North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, signed a law that obliges transgender people to use public lavatories according to their birth sex, notionally to protect other vulnerable patrons; it also mandates a statewide anti-discrimination policy that omits sexuality as a criterion.

Following a pattern established last year in Indiana, the fallout included litigation and boycotts, including one by Bruce Springsteen. Facebook, Bank of America and the National Basketball Association, among many others, weighed in. “Welcome to North Carolina”, read a protest billboard near the state border; “please set your clock back 100 years”. If the law “protected the life of just one child or one woman from being molested,” insists Dan Forest, the lieutenant-governor, the uproar “was worth it.” Mr Springsteen’s stance, rages Mr Forest, “shows the value he places on the women and children of our state.” The governor is sounding less combative: in a conciliatory gesture on April 12th he expanded the equal-employment policy for state workers to cover sexuality.

Mississippi’s governor, meanwhile, has signed an even more startling bill, which allows religious organisations both to fire people and refuse services on the basis of belief, and protects devout bakers and disc-jockeys who eschew same-sex weddings; officials may now recuse themselves from licensing or presiding over them. Disapproval of sex outside marriage (as well as of the gay variety) is one of the convictions the law expressly safeguards. Numerous other bills addressing the use of restrooms and matrimonial tastes have surfaced elsewhere. Virginia’s governor vetoed one of them.

Sexuality is not the only preoccupation. As well as the right to take guns to class, “constitutional carry”—whereby concealed weapons may be carried without a permit—has been exercising legislatures. West Virginia’s Republican-dominated assembly overrode a veto by the Democratic governor to enforce it. In a session that rivalled Georgia’s in its ultraconservatism, West Virginia also enshrined English as the state’s official language (even though its motto is in Latin) and banned some abortion procedures.

Abortion-related activity, says Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, which monitors it, has been “very intense”, fuelled in part by the furore over Planned Parenthood. Along with Indiana’s ban on terminations motivated by fetal disabilities, Florida withdrew funds from abortion-providers; Kentucky imposed new pre-procedure counselling rules.

Do not go gently

On the face of it, much of this seems odd. Judging by the rhetoric of the Republican presidential contest, the country is going to the dogs; in parts of the South, the infrastructure is indeed crumbling. Yet the region’s politicians are concentrating on problems that, to put it mildly, are often less than pressing. Florida passed a law stopping clergy from being dragooned into conducting same-sex marriages, a threat already neutralised by America’s constitution. Predatory men infiltrating women’s toilets, the spectre raised in North Carolina and elsewhere, is a similarly apocryphal fear. Remarkably some southern governors have elevated such concerns above job-creation. Many in Georgia think Mr Deal should have followed suit: predicting that “religious liberty” will haunt next year’s session, too, Josh McKoon, a disappointed state senator, says that while “prosperity is an important value, so is individual freedom”.

What explains this eccentric turn? It is a reaction, most obviously, to last year’s Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, of the kind that often follows dramatic social change. Melton McLaurin, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, notes that this particular “rearguard action” resembles opposition to racial desegregation in emphasising the supposed endangerment of women and children. But many southern Republicans feel beleaguered by more than one ruling: they see Washington as at once insidiously liberal and hopelessly gridlocked. Religious-liberty bills and the like offer the consolation of decisive action (even if some are destined to be struck down), of a sort that, unlike new roads and bridges, requires no tax dollars.

And if pressure from above is part of the current southern syndrome, so is insurgency from below. John Dinan of Wake Forest University observes that while stand-offs between the federal and state governments capture more attention, battles between states and municipalities have become as frequent and fierce. The mess in North Carolina originated partly in response to an anti-discrimination ordinance implemented by the council in Charlotte; Tennessee and Arkansas had previously passed laws squashing related city-level initiatives. In February the Alabama legislature nixed a minimum-wage hike introduced in Birmingham (North Carolina’s law also tags on a statewide employment clause). Forgetting, temporarily, their reverence for local self-determination, lots of states have counteracted municipal efforts to control guns; some have moved on to ensuring the unimpeded statewide carrying of knives.

Tension between urban liberals and their more conservative environs is an old story, given extra piquancy by the migration to some southern cities of sophisticated types from elsewhere in the country. Yet the role of demography in the South’s political convulsions runs deeper. As well as exemplifying the frictions between different levels of government and different strands of Republicanism (business-minded and religious), these flashpoints also illuminate a bigger clash: between the past and the future.

Americans’ southward migration—for jobs, cheaper living or better weather to retire in—is helping to transform not just individual towns but the South’s overall complexion. Arrivals from overseas are contributing too; many first-generation immigrants can’t vote, but their children will. All this means that the share of southern states’ populations born outside the region is rising. Already, around 30% of Georgians and North Carolinians come from elsewhere (Florida and Virginia are even more diluted). Georgia is set to be a “majority-minority” state by 2025. Even in less cosmopolitan places, the balance is shifting. Mississippi’s whites, for example, will be outnumbered by mid-century.

Twilight of an empire

As Florida and Virginia have shown, this evolution unmoors political allegiances. It is concurrent with a generational upheaval in attitudes, most starkly in young Americans’ milder views on sexuality. In this light, the rush of reactionary legislation can be seen as the flailing of a long-dominant group which senses that the states it has ruled, as well as the country, are escaping its grasp. As Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an advocacy organisation, sees it, these are “the dying throes of a bygone era”.

For the time being, this defiance may help southern Republicans, by galvanising some pious voters who might otherwise have stayed at home in November. Equally, though, the revanchism could hurt. The “coat-tail” effect generally works down the ballot, “from the White House to the courthouse”, says Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia; but when related worries—say, the whiff of nastiness—pervade the ticket, the influence can flow both ways. In North Carolina that may damage Mr McCrory, who faces re-election, and the Republican nominee for president. In the long term, if they remain fixated on bathrooms, southern Republicans may, like Agamemnon, expire there.