Terri Schiavo was allowed to die. And in opinion poll after opinion poll most Americans felt, with sadness but with conviction as well, that the courts had been right.
And something stirred. Americans are deeply religious but they are also deeply attached to the idea that folks can get on with their lives unmolested by government. When the two clashed, freedom won. The Strange Death of Social Conservatism as the driving force in US politics was under way. 2006 confirmed it: a thumping, the President called it, as the midterm election results returned Democrats to power in Congress, delivered the first-ever defeat to a state ballot initiative that would have banned gay marriage (in Arizona) and approved state funding of stem-cell research in, of all places, Missouri.
Nothing the voters decide this November will change this dynamic. Not even the fantastic Mrs Palin - the Iron Lady of Alaska - who is on the Republican ticket to serve a purpose but not, frankly, to serve in office. Mrs Palin's views are certainly of the hard-line Religious Right but the party is not intending that they become policy and the party would be destroyed if they did.
The idea (which Mrs Palin backs) that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest was tried out on the people of South Dakota recently. South Dakota is no friend of abortion but even these conservative voters nixed the plan.
No, America is changing and a new era is beginning: a post-Reagan era in which social conservatism (galvanising Republicans and terrifying Democrats) is replaced as the driving force in US politics by...
Well, we don't know.
