>I disagree with your assessment that Texas has wide acceptance for opposing viewpoints, at least out in the suburbs where I grew up. If you were not religious and conservative (I have my own anecdotes), you did not fit in. Only when I went to college in a college town did people largely seem to want to live and let live. Sure, inside the larger cities it is more cosmopolitan...

That doesn't sound very specific of Texas, that's the case pretty much everywhere