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Sure, Kenneth Starr was reaching back to his roots as a preacher's son-- Starr père once preached a sermon on the moral dangers of women wearing short pants. But the motto of Starr fils' 600-page inquisitor's brief against Bill Clinton could be the feminist slogan, "The personal is political." Starr's juiciest findings-- the cigar up the Lewinsky pussy, the blowjob given as the president talked on the phone to Congress-- came from an inquiry into Clinton's testimony in a case of "sexual harassment," a liberal cause celebre. In getting the nitty-gritty details broadcast around the US, Starr pulled a coup beyond the wildest imagination of gay sex chronicler Boyd McDonald, who spent his life archly mocking the media's squeamishness about basic bodily activities.

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Starr's investigation is all about a right-wing Republican cabal ganging up on a (right-wing) Democratic president. But it also shows how the Right now deftly exploits a world that their opponents have transformed. It was liberals who welcomed democratic state regulation over sex to break the power of the church and family. Radicals pushed for sexual frankness in the face of conventional silence. Liberals sought social workers to expose the dark secrets of the patriarchal family. The gay movement lobbied for pearls of recognition from the state-- rights laws, gay marriage, domestic partnership, hate-crimes legislation-- as in other times people sought indulgences from the pope.

As the family and church and the power of convention have indeed lost much of their sway over sex, the state has grabbed more and more. Always, it insists it has the best of intentions-- protecting the innocent, empowering women, getting to the truth. Clinton himself has exploited the state's new reach over sex more than any other president-- vigorously promoting lifetime registries for sexual outlaws, predatory porn and sex stings on the Internet, expanding "sexual harassment" to cover virtually any relationship forged on the job. As bad as all this, who would have expected this new regime of sexual meddling could topple a US president?

For all the widespread sense in the US that Starr went too far, there surprisingly little objection to those who were his tools. The Nuremberg trials supposedly discredited the idea that simply because the state tells you to do something, you jump to it. Yet into the grand jury room walked presidential friend, associate, and paramour to comply into an inquisition about his sex life. Even the president of the US, it seems, could not inspire loyalty enough to risk prison-- and neither he nor anyone else expected it. This shows that friendship and loyalty have degraded in 1990s America as they do under in the most repressive societies.

Repression of sex in the US today is not news to many. There are tens of thousands of people in North America whose only chance at getting out of the sex gulags depends on passing "lie detector" tests, and not getting erections when shown images a therapist says are "inappropriate." Others people will die in jail, convicted on evidence as concocted as anything at a Stalin show trial.

But the Starr inquiry shows that this is more than ordinary repressiveness. Totalitarianism regimes routinely consume even their own leadership. Part of their surprising appeal and legitimacy, is the endless entertainment value they offer, the spectacle of the powerful, as much as everyone else, falling hard. It's not the excesses of Starr that's so disturbing, but a system of sex regulation where privacy does not exist for anyone. If even President Clinton has to hand over a blood sample to the FBI to aid its investigation, what hope for privacy is there for anyone else? In this case, equality not a consoling thought.