This intriguing Pajamas Media analysis by Burt Prelutsky made me wonder:

The question some people would ask [about the affair between L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa and reporter Mirthala Salinas] is whether a politician's personal code of morality should matter to his constituents. Being a right-winger, I'm honest enough to admit that I am far more willing to give a conservative the benefit of the doubt. However, there are bigger questions to consider. For instance: What the heck are the French going to say?

Allow me to explain: Back when Bill Clinton was leaving his mark on history by leaving his mark on Monica Lewinsky's dress, one of the most aggravating aspects of the tawdry affair was having our great nation being patronized by the European media. As usual, the snidest commentary came to us courtesy of the French.

They were like 80 million cats lapping up cream. Our alleged lack of sophistication is like food and drink to them. They couldn't stop snickering over our bourgeois value system. After all, their premier had a mistress. Only people as backward as Americans would make a fuss over something so natural. All the while, the French ignored the fact that Clinton had committed perjury, which many of us took far more seriously than whether he had cheated on Hillary.

But, much as I hate doing it, I'm afraid I have to admit that, for once, the French weren't entirely off base. While I regard Clinton as a national albatross for a variety of reasons, quite aside from his having sex with a young intern, I happen to think that where sex is concerned, Americans are, by and large, childish and embarrassing.

Sometimes, I swear, people are so daffy when it comes to things even slightly sexual that I almost feel like donning a beret, lighting up a stinky cigarette, and snorting through my nose.

Why, for example, is there such a fiercely determined movement out to show that homosexuality (affecting a minuscule percentage of the American population) is a dire threat to all of Western Civilization?

To be fair, Burt Prelutsky notes that this same worry is probably more frequently applied to heterosexuality:

...Playboy has been displaying even prettier girls in and out of bikinis for about 50 years. Still, every summer, as predictably as the swallows returning to Capistrano, you can count on pundits endlessly kicking the topic around in newspapers and on talk shows. What's more, if I could collect 25 cents for every Sunday sermon in which some minister pondered whether this marked the end of Western civilization, I could run out and buy a new car.

In fairness, I think there really is a sort of war being waged against sex. (At least on sexual freedom.)

As to who's winning, I don't know. It strikes me that it's a very old war.

Not that Bill Clinton didn't have his sexual moments. But if the Republican Party is trying to position itself as the anti-sex party, and if the Democrats don't reciprocate by being the "Sex Party," (and there are clear signs they're too smart to do that) the Republicans will be portrayed as looking sillier than they already look.

While I mentioned the Playboy-makes-men-into-child-molesters crowd, and the Brokeback-Mountain-mean-death-of-Western-Civilization people, plenty of other examples could be found. Dinesh D'Souza thinks the issue is Larry Flynt, and the answer is a conservative alliance with "traditional" Muslims, while Ben Shapiro thinks the issue is the "hypersexualization" of society, and the answer is censorship. And of course, bioethicist Leon Kass has long been against licking ice cream cones. (Whatever would the 80 million French cats say about that?)

Where does this leave people who aren't sex-obsessed hedonists, but who also aren't sex-obsessed Puritans?

I just don't think it's fair that the we all have to be dragged into this war on sex kicking and screaming whether we like it or not, while all those French cats are licking and lapping!