In a venomous opinion this week, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia denounced what he called the "disproportionate political power" of gays in this society. His attack highlights the way in which gays are being singled out for punishment for what is a far greater change underway, an American sexual meltdown. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez, author of "Days of Obligation" (Viking-Penguin) and a regular contributor to the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

Does Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wear boxers or briefs? What do you think he does in the dark? And should we care?

In broad daylight, Scalia is a hefty fellow, a family man of (as some politicians like to say) "traditional values." Scalia is, to be sure, a brilliant legal scholar -- or so he has long seemed to me. But this week, in a venomous opinion, the Justice (echoing the traditional lament of the anti-Semite) informed us that homosexuals constitute a group with "disproportionate political power," "high disposable income" and "enormous influence in the American media."

Justice Scalia was petulant and in the minority. For this week, the Supreme Court (by a six-three ruling) struck down a provision of a Colorado constitution that prohibits anti-gay discrimination laws. Arguing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy observed that Colorado has no right to make homosexuals "unequal to everyone else."

As a homosexual man, I was relieved by the ruling. Though I do not forget that the Colorado provision, known as Amendment 2, was passed by 53 percent of that state's voters in 1992. Similar provisions are pending in Idaho, Oregon and Washington and are in effect locally in Florida, Oregon and Idaho.

Some very deep change is going on in America and it is as widespread as it is surprising. Americans -- men and women, married and not, young and old -- are examining what it means to be sexual creatures. Mama's decision to leave the kitchen, to be more than mother and wife, to work as an equal with men, may be the most revolutionary change of recent years. But the gay movement is the most inflammatory evidence of sexual meltdown. Gays, therefore, must be punished for the sins of the wife.

Justice Scalia provocatively chose a German word to describe what is happening in America: "Kulturkampf" -- a culture war. What I see is an astonishing change. I meet homosexual men and women now in every corner of American life.

Everywhere people are "out" and, more remarkably, they are being accepted by their families and their friends and their co-workers. I know, like you, stories of parents who no longer speak to their children. But I am more impressed by the accommodation taking place throughout America.

I think of two Catholic families in California. They have been united in recent years by the love of two dying men -- lovers dying of AIDS. There they all were -- 50 smiling faces in a Christmas photograph. Three or four generations, standing alongside the two thinning men. That is the way the sexual revolution is taking place -- by the Christmas tree, within the very family that Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson invoke for their own purposes as unchanging and rigid.

It is, paradoxically, because so many Americans are growing unafraid of homosexuality that the counter-movement has grown. Homosexual activists tend to forget this. They incline to portray the gay movement as "counter-cultural."

I think, rather, that the politicians and religious leaders who parade under banners of TRADITION and FAMILY have become the counter-culture. And they know it. That was partly what Justice Scalia meant to imply: homosexuals have power.

I am not being overly optimistic. I suspect that the great, perhaps even calamitous struggle in the next century will be a cultural war, pitting the secular against the fundamentalist.

In America, the sense of being in the minority has recently galvanized "traditionalists." They got out the vote in Colorado. But they did so because they feel under threat. Much of America is no longer compliant to their will.

Do I think there will be more anti-gay legislation passed? Yes. Are we in for dangerous times? Yes. Do I think that there are many judges in America who will remain preoccupied by what I do in the dark?

But the other day I received a letter from my first-grade teacher, a Catholic nun now in her 80's. "About your being gay," she writes, "I don't have any problem with it. I only pray that you will be a good man."