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By syndicated columnist Tom Teepen
Hide the children. There's a sex fiend on the loose, pretending to be a political party. Have you noticed that Republicans - the ones in Washington, anyway - are going sex-crazy?
I asked Dr. Shirley Zussman, former president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists, what she'd say about someone who has been as concerned with sex as the GOP recently has been.
"That they are completely preoccupied," she said, "with sexual thoughts and fantasies."
The latest weirdness comes from Republican Congressman Steve Stockman of Texas who has put in a bill demanding congressional hearings on the 1948 sex study by researcher Alfred Kinsey. Stockman suspects Kinsey used child molesters to get his data on youth sexuality.
Loopy as this is, Stockman's pitch, with 40 co-sponsors including the congressman who would chair the hearings, has a good chance of prevailing next year.
A House subcommittee recently held hearings based in part on suspicions that AIDS education is a plot to lure the young into homosexuality. A party that wasn't embarrassed to give such foolishness congressional cachet won't shy from cranking up an inquisition on 50-year-old research.
(In fact, Kinsey's data on child sexuality, collected by debriefing pedophiles, may be questionable, but that is a matter for scientific inquiry, about which Congress doesn't know beans.)
The anti-gay hearings were a political sop to the Rev. Louis Sheldon and his Traditional Values Coalition.
The Kinsey hearings would tickle Gary Bauer's Family Research Council and other groups working to discredit findings - which are hardly exclusive to Kinsey - that even young children have sex instincts.
Bauer's outfit has run ads equating sex education with child molesting, a violation of what the religious right believes to be sexless innocence.
Meanwhile, the party's ideological gurus are calling for a return to Victorianism. Key GOP senators have been preoccupied with sex in art exhibits. State Republican parties have joined campaigns to bar homosexuals from seeking legal protection from discrimination.
The GOP right is adopting legislation to make cyberspace a sexual police state. If the anti-porn extremism proves technically feasible and withstands constitutional muster - and happily neither is likely - an exciting new technology will be reduced to a medium for juvenilia.
And although Republicans were unable to keep Jocelyn Elders from becoming surgeon general on the grounds she had said sexually active teens should use condoms, they finally ran her off when she was caught saying masturbation happens.
Republicans were shocked! Shocked!
But then they are easily shocked these days, and the rest of us are left to wonder what all the fuss is about, at least as a political agenda.
Is it the business of government to monitor our bedrooms, direct our sexual orientation, rifle through our reading choices, police our art and shake down sexual research for political correctness?
Anyone with the GOP's rap sheet of sexual obsessions would have a hard time getting out on parole.
(Tom Teepen is national correspondent for Cox Newspapers. His column is distributed by the New York Times News Service.)