ABSTRACT
Few people think of the public policy implications of their sexual activities. After all, a common enough and not unreasonable attitude is that “it is none of the government’s business.” However, they could not be more wrong. In the United States, the government has been in the “business” of sex from the very beginning. Even before independence from England, colonial-era governments mandated innumerable restraints on sexual display and behavior. Remember that Hester Prynne, the heroine in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel of seventeenth-century Boston, The Scarlet Letter, was not forced to wear an embroidered red letter A on her breast because of her excellence in athletics. And A was not the only letter to be seen in Puritan towns during the colonial period. P had to be worn by paupers living on public relief. This policy helped the children learn their letters and improve their vocabulary as they saw alphabetically humiliated people on a daily basis: A is for adulterer; P is for pauper, and so on. Just like Sesame Street!
