Hey, Phil, it took a while, but I posted a response (of sorts) here.

Have spent 10 years in TX, 5 in AL, 2 in GA, and it is still a foriegn land. Bush and Rove broke the silence, they have made public and acceptable a culture that has long simmered here, as the dominant one. Not just theocratic, but patriarchal, clannish, choleric, resentful, apocalyptic. Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Deliverance. I am almost “one of them,” or can pass, if I stay diffident. But to speak out here is just about unthinkable. Free speech, right. “Where you from, Boy?” “Where you go to Church”? I would say, The Peoples Temple, but they might ask for directions.