When people agree always to say something they all know to be untrue, they destroy more than one solitary truth: they form a destructive habit. Soon they agree on another lie, and then another and another, until, well, the whole damn country goes insane.

Bill Clinton was right: we all lie about sex. But not in the way he meant it.

Jesse Jackson said that we couldn't say "black" anymore. All at once, university presidents, network anchors, United States congressmen and senators, corporate executives, even Republican politicians, said "African-American." I think the last people to stop saying "black" were the black people themselves, who had not been consulted.

I don't know who the Jesse Jackson it was that stopped us from saying that men and women are equal and made us say that they are alike, but alike it is. So we forgot about equality and pretended not to notice the differences, and, lo, now we can't figure out who is a man and who is a woman.

Perhaps other people's memories go further back in their childhoods than mine, but I cannot remember a time when I didn't know that there were men and women, boys and girls. When I was three years old, and probably not a particularly precocious three, I knew more than Harvard graduates do now. I didn't even have to go to kindergarten.

We have been lying about sex for so long, and so assiduously, that I have often considered simply telling the plain truth about it, but always hesitated because it's embarrassing to say what everyone already knows, even though no one actually says it.

We live in such a Cowardly New World that I bet that there are now even college students who don't know where meat comes from. They like to eat it and don't think we should hurt animals, and their parents and educators don't want to hurt their feelings, and… so I guess I have to hurt some feelings.

We pretend that prejudice causes people to commit suicide after "sex-change operations" that should be called "sexual organ mutilations" and should earn the surgeons long stays in jail instead of immense wealth.

We pretend that each of us, male or female, has a place on a sexual continuum that runs from total masculinity to total femininity. Sometimes we pretend that our place is fixed; sometimes we pretend that we can move from one place to another. A male homosexual is a male on the feminine end of the continuum, and a female homosexual is on the male end. Our sexuality is thereby divorced from our biology.

This is to conflate femininity and effeminacy. A male homosexual is in no way more feminine than a male heterosexual, nor is a female homosexual masculine. When a male homosexual has sex with another man, he does not do so in the same manner a woman does, nor does he have the same experience of it. His manner and his experience are disordered; hers are not.

He remains in every respect male. He is fully male. Male homosexuals know this and only pretend not to know it. In fact, they often brag that they are the real males, not those wimpy heterosexuals.

Sex with other men does not feel normal to them, whatever their activists say about it. They know that it is unnatural, strange, weird. Their desire is not for something natural, just with different partners. Their desire is for the abnormal, unnatural, strange, weird. That's what excites them. In a country now filled with weirdness, that should not be so hard to understand. One weirdness leads to another.

Enough with the lies we tell about homosexuality. Now for the lies about heterosexuals, which are even more harmful because there are more heterosexuals and because they are more likely to have children. The liars are the same anyway.

A favorite heterosexual lie is that men like Bill Clinton are over-sexed. They are under-sexed, as a simple reflection on their situation should make obvious. Let's say that you are one of these under-sexed critters who require the excitement of new sexual partners. I don't care how slick you are, you're going to find satisfying your appetite impossible unless your appetite isn't very good in the first place, which is, after all, the cause of your problem. The horny accountant or bank teller, on the other hand, has figured out that the only answer is always being with the same woman. Hooking up is not the norm in this decadent age; serial monogamy is.

The "over-sexed" Bill Clinton is just a testosterone-challenged boor -- or something much worse. The over-sexed man has no idea what masculinity is. There was a time not so long ago when people knew what masculinity and femininity are and would say so. Handsome is as handsome does. Masculinity is more than having a lot of sex, certainly more than having a little bit of sex with a lot of women. Femininity is more than sleeping around.

A man goes to work every day, no matter how much he does not want to, and remains faithful to his wife and children. Yes, to his children too. A man does not cheat only on his wife. Bill Clinton is not a man. He is not masculine.

A woman can see that her husband does not look like Tom Cruise and knows that he has some unattractive habits, but she loves him anyway and remains faithful to him and to her children. If she has to work outside the home, she goes to work every day, no matter how much she does not want to.

The lie that masculinity lies in sexual conquest and femininity in sexual endowments is the same lie that the Jesse Jackson of scientists got us telling: that people are animals and humanity is about spreading genes.

Dogs show a lot of affection for one another, except when they are having sex. I never saw much affection between a bull and a cow. The cow looked scared and when it was all over went off with her lady friends and shunned the beast. Neither of them lied about it. We, who have better ways of deciding when to copulate than our sense of smell, lie against reason, lie against science, lie against the wisdom of our ancestors, and lie against God.