Not just something that wacko people in Alabama do - I was clued into the gigantic NYT Magazine article "The Young Hipublicans" by Steve Miller's CultureWatch. (No, that's not my cousin Charlie they are talking about.) It's worth repeating at length the depiction of the gay-friendly views among at least some of these new campus conservatives:

But the difference between the college conservatives of 20 years ago and today goes deeper than dress. Many members of the Bucknell conservatives club, for instance, endorse same-sex unions. Corey Langer recently wrote a Counterweight article supporting gay marriages. This is a far cry from D'Souza's day, when gay males were termed ''sodomites'' in The Dartmouth Review. In part, the Bucknellians' openness to gays and lesbians can be attributed to the strong streak of libertarianism that runs through the club -- a conviction that the government should stay out of any and all aspects of life, including the bedroom. But you can't hang out long with the Bucknell Conservatives and not form the opinion that their tolerance on issues like homosexuality goes beyond libertarianism.

Like the rest of their generation, they've been trained, from preschool onward, in the tenets of cooperation, politeness and racial and gender sensitivity. As much as they would hate to admit it -- as hard as they try to fight it -- these quintessential values have suffused their consciousness and tempered their messages. You can see it in Charles Mitchell's editorship of The Counterweight. Back in the 1980's, the editors of campus conservative newspapers subscribed to the theory spelled out by D'Souza in his book ''Letters to a Young Conservative.'' ''At The Dartmouth Review,'' he wrote: ''To confront liberalism fully we . . . had to subvert liberal culture, and this meant disrupting the etiquette of liberalism. In other words, we had to become social guerrillas. And this we set out to do with a vengeance.''

D'Souza and his colleagues reveled in the shock and outrage they awakened with open gay-baiting and racist and sexist jokes. Charles Mitchell eschews such vicious tactics. Humor is crucial, but he has no desire to be mistaken for a bigot. ''There are a few conservatives,'' he admits, ''who would say, 'That's good, people are calling you a racist, you must be getting your point across.''' Mitchell rejects this. ''The point is not to create outrage -- at least not for us,'' he says. ''The point is to get your ideas out there and make a difference.'' For Mitchell, the goal is to persuade the politically undeclared students who make up the largest percentage of the college's undergraduate population -- a group he estimates at some 75 percent of all students -- that they are, in fact, already part of the movement. Though they don't necessarily think of themselves as Republican, the stance they take on individual issues -- taxes, abortion, affirmative action -- gives them a conservative identity. And being a conservative can be cool and, as Mitchell puts it, not ''just something that wacko people in Alabama do.''

For what it's worth, I spent the time tracking down the pro-gay marriage article written by Langer. The broadside -- written by the pictures editor for the group's Counterweight magazine -- wasn't the most intellectual refutation of gay marriage opponents, but it did seem to speak from the heart. Langer, after all, counts himself as a member of Bucknell FLAG&BT and sees no discrepancy with his conservative identity. While the follow-up letters published in later issues made it clear not all of the paper's readers are as progressive as Langer, it's nice to find more evidence that among young people -- even those who call themselves conservatives -- change is in the air.