The truth about sex lies is that they are everywhere, not just in the U.S. Presidency. For example, lesbians and gays are raised to sex lie. It's the premise of our survival and always has been. As was written by a founder of Manhattan's Hetrick-Martin Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth, the whole business of gay childhood is "Learning To Hide." Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered kids hide their orientations to avoid murder, suicide, expulsion from school, ridicule, harassment, exorcism, and "reparative" therapy. How well they lie is how well they survive. Gay girls often lie by getting pregnant and gay men sometimes lie by dating prospective nuns to avoid sexual encounter. Most often gays lie by marrying heterosexuals. They then lie to their spouses about their infidelity. Likewise most non-gay Americans learn to sex lie because our country has fetishized and demonized sex to the point that telling the truth about it rarely crosses anyone's mind. Of course, only for gays is the phenomenon so rigidly institutionalized that not lying is criminal in twenty states and grounds for discharge from the US Military. The biggest lies are so huge they're completely invisible. For example, there's the lie that gender roles exist somewhere outside the culture so that males and females "naturally" fall into different behavior patterns. That particular lie is government-sponsored through any public school with a "gender-appropriate" dress code. Then there's the lie about humans' forming families only with members of opposite genders. This lie is enforced through bans against same-sex marriage. There is also the lie, enforced through anti- adultery laws, that all humans are monogamous, and that partners of the non- monogamous are always "wronged." And then there is the truth that "Don't Ask Don't Tell" is a full-time job, requiring constant lookout. The non-telling gay lives in a constant state of "heads up," altering pronouns, falsifying sites, hiding books, and so on. So do you know who's getting treated like a gay these days? Bill Clinton. It's not half as bad for him as it is for gays, because his orientation is the majority one (unless all this stuff is a really elaborate beard). But Clinton is being perceived as sexually deviant, just like gays, and it matters not one whit whether Hillary Rodham Clinton is relieved or reviled by her husband's alleged extracurricular activities. No one either asks or tells whether the Clintons have an open relationship, or that it's entirely possible all the allegations are untrue. Clinton's got the rap and all's fair. Everyone's on the bandwagon. The feminist protectionists began to re- sanctionize sex just as the sixties activists effected some release of gay's and women's rights from the tyranny of "anti-pornography" and anti-abortion legislation. Now we've got interpretations of anti-harassment laws that completely preclude consensual sex between superiors and employees, sometimes even among colleagues. But the fact is that most men and women on the planet have been socialized to exactly opposite premises. Women are still very much brought up to seek jobs where from they might marry their bosses. Concurrently boys are infused with models of men as sexual advancers toward women who wait on tuffets and about whose compliance they are always expected to lie. Men are socialized to feel actually un-chivalrous and un-manned for declining the advances of women, and people whose sexual scope exceeds monogamy are enjoined categorically to lie. Indeed, how would Clinton get out of it if an old friend came on to him in the Oval Office? If she rushed up and mashed him how would he avoid her departing in a disheveled condition? Could even a mildly chauvinistic southern gentleman ever tell, even if asked, that this happened? And who would believe him? The pro-Clinton polls continue to baffle the press who perseverate in their heapings on of randy allegations. But the American people WANT Clinton to deny the allegations! They do not want any "truth" that embarrasses Hillary or Chelsea, and they do not want their children to learn that some leaders are non-monogamous any more than they want their children to learn that some people are non-heterosexual! The Clinton bandwagon is Arthur Miller's witch trials exposé, The Crucible. "I saw Billy Clinton with the Devil" exclaim Paula Jones, Linda Tripp and Kathleen Willey. And back to the pedestal women go. Goody Paula's alleged and highly improbable glimpse of one penis one decade ago is worth millions of dollars for the unprovable and hence un-disprovable concoctions "consequent sexual aversion" and "tort of outrage." No matter that this woman married and bore two children in the interim. Are these turkey-baster babies? Monica Lewinsky has been utterly infantalized so that the disparity of her and Bill Clinton's status renders her incapable of consent, like a child, or an idiot. And a woman whose contemporaneous correspondence indicates that she was actually PURSUING the President, is overnight a national media-level victim, courting half-million dollar publishing deals and asking her friends to lie about the President of the United States at the witch trials. Prudery legislated through censorship and witch-hunts has been, throughout U.S. history, a weapon of choice against women and gay men, a major case in point being the Comstock Act of 1873 prohibiting all reproductive rights and sex education as "pornographic." Then there were the theater padlock laws closing shows on gay themes, and the state liquor laws forbidding sale of alcohol to "known homosexuals." Today Congressional prudery still blocks gay-specific, i.e. effective, HIV education as "indecent." The witch hunts have gone too far and the civil system is completely out of control. As we speak, the Senate considers "spawn of CDA bills" S.1619 and S.1482 which restate the very same Internet censorship rejected by the US Supreme Court's 1997 Reno v. ACLU's unanimous overturn of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. As the volume increases for wider and wider censure of social interaction in the workplace and elsewhere, our free- wheeling, sex-transfixed culture is emboldened by movies, music and talk shows. In confused reflex, the government extorts from its artists the "voluntary" scarlet letters R, X, and PG. Very little is true in sexual matters except the following: As long as these legal-verses-cultural conflicts persist, sex lying will indeed remain this county's single highest and most practical virtue. (c) Sandy Rapp 1998 Sandy Rapp is a feminist activist and singer whose CD We The People is available at SandyRapp@aol.com & (516) 329-5193, and whose book God's Country: A Case Against Theocracy is available at 1(800) 3-HAWORTH. Her column runs regularly in Long Island's gay paper Rainbow Community News.