The New York Times this morning has a brief but informative analysis of the Christian right's movement to affect policies at the state level. Many of them took the Bush victory in the presidential election as a mandate, a sign that they are the majority and that laws at the federal and local levels should reflect their religious views.

Energized by electoral victories last month that they say reflect wide support for more traditional social values, conservative Christian advocates across the country are pushing ahead state and local initiatives on thorny issues, including same-sex marriage, public education and abortion.

"I think people are becoming emboldened," said Michael D. Bowman, director of state legislative relations at Concerned Women for America, a conservative Christian advocacy group based in Washington. "On legislative efforts, they're getting more gutsy, and on certain issues, they may introduce legislation that they normally may not have done."

It is on the state level "where most family issues are decided," Mr. Bowman said. And it is there that local advocacy groups hope to build quickly on the momentum from the election when legislatures convene in the new year.

In Texas, conservative Christians are backing an amendment to prevent human cloning, a measure that would also block the kind of cloning used in embryonic stem-cell research. In Georgia, advocacy groups hope to win approval this year of two measures limiting abortion, after redistricting helped Republicans take control of the state legislature. In Kansas, conservatives have won a majority on the State Board of Education, which is expected to introduce changes this spring to the high school science curriculum challenging the theory of evolution. And in Maryland, some black churches have joined with a white Republican state delegate to push for a ban on same-sex marriage. Christian Conservatives Press Issues in Statehouses (free registration required)

Issues such as gay marriage, cloning and stem cell research, and abstinence-only sex education are defined in the press these days as "moral values" issues, as the word "moral" seems to have lost its original meaning -- it has taken on a new definition like, "Conforming to the beliefs and practices of certain religious groups." Right and wrong have become more or less irrelevant to the term.

While Christian conservatives say the most promising legislative and policy efforts are in states that went for Mr. Bush, they are also optimistic about ballot issues they are championing in traditionally Democratic states like Maryland.

Are you okay with that? Are you willing to give these people free run in the legislature, the city council, the school board? Do you know what you have to do? You have to fight back.

Liberal advocacy groups say they plan to fight many of these efforts. But Mr. Romero of the A.C.L.U. said that beyond filing legal challenges, liberals needed to appropriate the language of morality from Christian conservatives to capture the popular imagination.

"Lawsuits are about telling stories, and we need to talk about why we picked this case and why it's important," he said. "For instance, we need to ask, where is the morality when a partner of 20 years is denied hospital access because a state doesn't believe in gay marriage? Where is the morality in forcing a teenage girl into a back-alley abortion?"

Mr. Romero is referring to the old definition of morality, that old-fashioned stuff about doing the good and avoiding the bad. Are there still people in Maryland who think that's important? How far will the religious right get, as far as forcing Marylanders to play along with their amoral agenda?