DALLAS – The voters’ conflicting sense of American values tilted in favor of President Bush last week. But his hard-won national majority papers over significant state-by-state differences in moral and religious values.

And if Bush gets to reshuffle the U.S. Supreme Court with a justice or two who are more congenial to states’ rights, reflections of the cultural divide could find their way into differences in state laws and people’s lives, some experts say.

Which states and what laws? Tuesday’s election results offer some clues.

This year’s pitched red-blue battles over a relatively few swing states were possible only because many states had already swung. Call the most-swung states “infrared” and “ultraviolet” – states where Tuesday’s margin of victory for either President Bush or John Kerry was about 10 percent or more.

Twenty-three states were infrared on Tuesday: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Eight, plus the District of Columbia, were ultraviolet: California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.

Coincidentally, each region includes about 30 percent of the U.S. population. These are the places where political majorities are large enough to most easily drive controversial legislation.

Polling and demographic data indicate that the broad split between infrared and ultraviolet was not so much over historically significant questions about the economy or national security. As in the rest of the nation, the most significant predictors of how someone voted in these states were answers to questions about religion, faith and moral values.

Some of Tuesday’s state-specific votes reinforced the sense of different values already in control of the two regions: Ultraviolet California approved state-funded fetal stem-cell research. On the other hand, eight of the 11 states that passed bans on gay marriage were infrared.

These kinds of differences have actually been showing up in state laws for a while. For instance, 23 states passed laws limiting a particular late-term abortion procedure before the federal law approved this year. Sixteen of those states are infrared and only two are ultraviolet. The only two states where homosexual relationships can be legally recognized – Vermont and Massachusetts – are both ultraviolet.

“This is clearly the direction we’re headed,” said Charles Colson, a Watergate defendant from the Nixon White House and the current chairman of Prison Fellowship, an evangelical Christian ministry. “Today we have two nations living in one country. To the extent you can have states acting independently, they will reflect one culture or the other.”

Consider a resident of infrared Texas, a decade or so down that road. Legal abortions and morning-after pills might be harder to find than government vouchers for private school. In ultraviolet Maryland, on the other hand, gay couples might be headed to the courthouse for legal recognition of their relationships or research on fetal stem cells might be a mainstay at Johns Hopkins University.

Or maybe residents of infrared America will send their children to school confident that sex education will teach abstinence only. And folks in ultraviolet America may take comfort in knowing if they suffer a particularly painful fatal illness that they will be able to find legal help to end their own lives.

Or maybe not. Some of these issues may be so hot that neither side is willing to let any state have the policy they disagree with. Maybe the 40 percent of Americans who don’t live in either ultraviolet or infrared states will develop a consensus that sloshes over onto the extremes. Or maybe the cultural split isn’t as deep as some are saying?

Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice is a lawyer who has argued in favor of states’ rights before the U.S. Supreme Court. He reads Bush’s re-election more as an unequal division over questions about terrorism and national security than about morals or faith.

“I don’t think we’re in this cultural civil war,” he said.

Even if he’s wrong and the battle is real, these changes would require truly historic shifts in federal courts. And the voters themselves might decide they aren’t happy with so divided a nation.

“The fact that we’re feeling that it might be possible is probably the most important corrective to it actually happening,” said Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. “Deep down, Americans don’t want this to happen.”

Retort other experts: Oh, really? These have always been the United States of America, and state legal differences are a vital part of the system. Differences in tax law, for instance, explain why Delaware is the corporate capital of the nation. And Americans have always recognized we have internal cultural differences.

“To be a New Yorker or to be a Texan is very different now,” said Dr. Richard Land, head of the Ethics and Religions Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. “We all know that.”

And the state-by-state cultural divide does make a difference, said Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“There is the very real possibility of a polarized country based on these hot-button social issues and the fact that state courts and state legislatures are going to reflect one side or the other of this polarity.”

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How important are the differences in religious or moral understandings between ultraviolet and infrared America? Demographics and exit poll results – all to be taken with a box of salt – indicate there are some real distinctions.

According to statistics compiled for Beliefnet.com by John Green, an expert on politics and religion at the University of Akron:

The percentage of voters who identified themselves as evangelical Christians in the infrared states (except for the special case of Utah) ranged from a low of 16.2 percent (North Dakota) to a high of 46.3 percent (Oklahoma). The range in ultraviolet states went from a low of 6.7 percent (Rhode Island) to a high of 22.5 percent. (Illinois).

In many states, exit pollsters asked several faith-related questions. When asked for the issue that mattered most in their presidential vote, 22 percent answered “moral values.”

That question was asked in 13 infrared states. Six of those states significantly beat the national average. For the six ultraviolet states where the question was asked, four were significantly below the average.

Compare the 49 percent of infrared Kentucky voters who said they attend religious services at least once a week to the 32 percent who answered that way in ultraviolet California. Or the 22 percent of Californians who say they never attend services compared with 8 percent in Kentucky.

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These differences can drive legislation. And the effects of legislation can drive people to find states where they feel more at home, Land said. That already happens, he said,

“New Yorkers who like Texas move to Texas, and Texans who like New York move to New York,” he said.

He is unconcerned that the differences risk damaging the broadly understood American identity.

But having these kinds of moral or religious divides reflected in state law would be bad for America, Lynn said.

“You should not be able to cross the border from California to Arizona and … read something only until you reach that border,” he said.

Or maybe having states reflect their culture in the law will make the whole country more peaceful, said the Rev. Robert Sirico, president of the Michigan-based Acton Institute, a think tank that considers ethics and public-policy questions.

“When you get a pot of water boiling and run a spoon through it, it stops the boiling for a while,” Sirico said.

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Both Bush and Kerry held out the hope of a broad national consensus in their speeches on Wednesday.

In his concession speech, Kerry said: “We must join in common effort without remorse or recrimination, without anger or rancor. America is in need of unity and longing for a larger measure of compassion.”

Bush matched that sentiment in his victory speech: “A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation. We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America.”

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Colson is among those who say they hope the nation does reach a broad agreement about values. He, of course, would set the national moral compass using his particular Christian theology. But he identifies a general danger in a division over morality.

“When you don’t have a moral consensus, you fracture as a society,” he said. “I’m hoping that changes.”

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