The warning call came in December 1995. "Do you folks on the mainland know what is going on here?" a friend from Hawaii asked Phil Burress, an anti-pornography crusader from the suburbs of Cincinnati.
Burress said that he did not. "They're going to legalize gay marriage here, and it's coming your way," the friend said, referring to a case before the Hawaii Supreme Court dealing with the right of same-sex couples to marry.
Burress, a self-described former pornography addict, had spent much of the 1990s fighting strip clubs and X-rated bookstores. But here was something he saw as a potentially greater threat to his fundamentalist Christian beliefs and what he considers to be traditional family values: something he called the "gay agenda."
So Burress helped lay the groundwork for a church-based conservative movement.
Most recently, Burress' organization gathered 575,000 signatures in less than 90 days to put a measure to ban gay marriages on the Ohio ballot, then helped turn out thousands of conservative voters on Election Day. Their support is widely viewed as having been crucial to President Bush's narrow victory in that swing state.
"In 21 years of organizing, I've never seen anything like this," Burress said. "It's a forest fire with a 100-miles-per-hour wind behind it."
Just days after their victories in the fall elections, Burress and other Christian conservative leaders met in Washington to discuss next year's constitutional amendment battles in about 10 states, including Arizona, Florida and Kansas.
They hope those fights will be the prelude to their real goal: amending the U.S. Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, a process that could take years.
"I'm building an army," Burress said. "We can't just let people go back to the pews and go to sleep."
Burress' opponents praise him for shaping issues in ways that are clear and compelling for the average voter. But they also say that he distorts those issues, and that he is closed-minded and intolerant of dissenting views, not to mention alternative ways of life.
"He is pretty frightening, because his and other spokesmen for the campaign believe that if you don't subscribe to their view, there is something morally wrong with you," said Alan Melamed, who managed the Ohio campaign against the constitutional amendment.
Burress disagrees with such descriptions. "I don't have a homophobic bone in my body," he said. "What I'm concerned about is having these things forced on our culture."