Sunday, February 7, 3:28 p.m. Among the convention’s several last-minute saves—opening the conference to media, replacing one speaker who fell ill and another who dropped last minute—was bringing on Andrew Breitbart.

On an Indian summer afternoon in front of the Justice Department yesterday, a group of dark-suited ministers gathered to protest recently-passed hate crimes legislation, saying it had had a “chilling effect” on religious freedom. 

“We will not be bullied!” cried Reverend Pat Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition, to a rank of cameras. “We will not be pressured! We will not go silently into the night!”

A black-clad traveling minister from Colorado Springs, Chaplain Klingenschmitt, upped the ante with a press release containing some choice anti-gay Bible verses and a challenge to arrest him for saying that homosexuals are “worthy of death.” “That does not mean that I am going to take action, or that I believe anyone should take action in that way,” he explained, calling the Matthew Shepard Act a “thought-crimes bill.” “My intention is the free exercise of religion. What other peoples’ intention is is up to them.”

Try as they might to pull a Cindy Sheehan, however, no federal sledgehammer descended. The police watched quietly from the perimeter as ministers decried homosexuality as an “abomination,” intervening only to clear gay rights activists off a concrete rise behind the podium (officers confirmed that there was not, in fact, anything the clergymen could have said to get themselves arrested—the act contains explicit protections for religious speech). Still, the ministers pressed on, undaunted by law enforcement’s refusal to persecute them. They hold tight to the belief that the anti-Christian crackdown is coming, because it’s happened before. Michael Marcavage, a young, green-eyed minister hugging a leatherbound Bible to his chest, has lived it.

'I could go on all day about what I'm proud of," Tom DeLay exults into his microphone at a recent Oxonian Society-sponsored luncheon in New York to hawk his new memoir, No Retreat, No Surrender. A year after his downfall, DeLay's leathery skin and the loose,papery bags under his eyes make him look old. But the message he delivers to the crowd is energetic and unrepentant: "I'm ... proud of the K Street Strategy. I was proud of the Terri Schiavo incident," he says. And, without irony: "We changed the culture of Washington."