Seems straightforward. Sure, there are reasonable people on all sides of the general arguments about circumcision, but if the CDC takes a rigorous look and decides to encourage the surgery, what harm can they do?

Only a little bit, it turns out, but in a place where it really hurts. Ed Morrissey of the conservative blog Hot Air writes, "If the CDC -- which is part of the same government that will control health care -- decides that circumcision is beneficial and cost-efficient in the long term, that same mechanism would create pressure on doctors and patients to perform them."

Morrissey's argument has the same basic flaw that animated the "death panel" fears: an inability to distinguish between advice and force. If this CDC proposal goes into effect, it, like the now-dead end-of-life counseling proposal, would make available some valuable medical advice. There's nothing on the table to penalize doctors who don't circumcise newborns, or parents who decline the procedure. To have a "mechanism [that] would create pressure on doctors and patients," you need, well, a mechanism. Morrissey can't come up with one.

But when was the last time that stopped these guys? Two days ago, Rush Limbaugh claimed, "It is President Obama who wants [to] mandate circumcision ... And that means, if we need to save our penises from anybody, it's Obama."

So now that we're talking about Limbaugh's penis, all of a sudden, we're in a world where the tiniest measure of government suggestion about sexual health equals a full onslaught against privacy. Expect to see the radio talker at the next march to protect abortion rights with a "Keep your government hands off my private parts" sign.

Recently, about a dozen Facebook groups formed to protest the Pope's statements, making their fury known with an oldfashioned gimmick: They sent condoms to the pope. A story on Saturday' CNN reported that the Facebook groups planned to send "millions" of condoms; on Monday, the most recent post from the 11,000+ member, Belgium-based "Condoms for the Pope" group claimed 70,000 had been sent.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the mass condom mailout sparked its own protests among Facebook users, who felt the display, though fabulously well-intentioned and dramatic, was a tad wasteful. Why not send the condoms to people who distributed them? Wouldn't those condoms just end up in a landfill? (Meanwhile, the debate over the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS continues as well, as the head of Harvard's AIDS Prevention Center surprisingly defended the Pope's statements, using logic the Geneva's chief of UN AIDS Prevention Unit called "ludicrous.")

No word on how the Pope has reacted to his special delivery, though I have a feeling there's been an increase in water balloon fights near the Vatican.

Renfroe -- apparently a magnanimous kind of guy -- was willing to admit that homosexuality isn't the only sin listed in the Bible. "I’m not saying this is the only sin that is out there. Obviously we have sin -- we have murder, we have, we have all sorts of sin, we have adultery, and we don’t make laws making those legal, and we would never think to make murder legal," he said.

Another Republican in the Colorado Senate, Sen. Dave Schultheis, wasn't about to be outdone. Explaining why he cast the lone vote against a bill that requires health care providers to test pregnant women for HIV (with their consent, of course), Schultheis said:

Sexual promiscuity, we know, causes a lot of problems in our state, one of which, obviously, is the contraction of HIV. And we have other programs that deal with the negative consequences -- we put up part of our high schools where we allow students maybe 13 years old who put their child in a small daycare center there.

We do things continually to remove the negative consequences that take place from poor behavior and unacceptable behavior, quite frankly, and I don’t think that’s the role of this body.

As a result of that I finally came to the conclusion I would have to be a no vote on this because this stems from sexual promiscuity for the most part.

More men adopt?: It's the first time the CDC has gathered adoption stats from men, and the findings may surprise you. Twice as many men as women adopt children. The numbers are clear, but the trend is complicated. Some attribute the glaring imbalance to divorce settlements, which usually place children with their mothers, leaving remarried men more likely than their wives to adopt stepchildren. Others credit the lack of options for gay men who want children: Gay men generally adopt, while gay women can have their own children.

Keep your hands to yourself, perv: New York subways are telling passengers to mind the gap -- not the one between the train and the platform, but the one between you and the person next to you. Over the next three months, MTA will circulate 2,000 posters that say, "Sexual harassment is a crime in the subway, too -- a crowded train is no excuse for an improper touch. Don't stand for it or feel ashamed, or be afraid to speak up." The ad campaign is a response to last year's unsettling report that 10 percent of women were sexually abused and 63 percent were sexually harassed while riding New York City Transit.

Remember the old-fashioned days, when people just had sex for money?: First it was sex for real estate, then it was sex for gas. The increasingly disturbing sex trade trend has stripped down to the essentials: sex for food. Growing food prices worldwide have forced women in the Pacific and Africa to offer sex in exchange for vital items like fish and cooking oil. It may be the only way for many women to get food, but the consequences are potentially deadly. U.N. officials say the horrifying trend is contributing to the spread of AIDS in malnourished women who aren't likely to survive an infection.

Stepford lives: Repression, subjugation and inequality aside, the '50s were totally great! Actually, besides that Great Depression and the subsequent war, the '30s and '40s were even better! For three women who think they're literally living in the past, having no dignity isn't so bad -- it's heaven. The women dress and live like they're living in the '30s, '40s and '50s. Sure, the women's desire to retreat from the rampant materialism of the present is reasonable, but the results are downright disturbing: "My job is to devote myself to Martin. He has a physical, stressful job and he loves coming home to a wife who looks pretty, has his meal ready in an immaculate house and has all the time in the world for him."

Helms hailed from the small town of Monroe, N.C., and he took its Norman Rockwell façade to heart, if we are to believe his bracingly style-free 2005 memoir, "Here's Where I Stand." "The good old days ... were indeed the good old days," he wrote. The senator's depiction of a Depression-era boyhood makes poverty and strife sound idyllic. In the memoir, his police chief father reconciles thieves with their victims and gives late-night succor to hobos. Also, young Jesse raises chickens as pets, then eats them.

Therefore, in the spirit of small-town hypocrisy, and the whiff of David Lynch that wafts heavenward alongside Helms' sugared Main Street memories, in the Southern tradition of the sweetly delivered comeuppance, and in memory of the Helms family's massacre of its feathered friends, let us pause to praise Mr. Helms as we bury him. In the wake of his departure, let us appreciate all the gifts the senator heaped on his opponents, meaning you, me, everyone we've ever known, most of the people on earth, and most of the good things about being alive. You liked it, he was agin' it: multiculturalism, government funding for the arts, gay rights, AIDS funding. Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela (on whom Helms turned his back during Mandela's visit to the U.S. Capitol). Integration, the United Nations, smoking bans, cancer researchers, nuclear arms reduction, the Martin Luther King holiday, Bill Clinton, Ryan White (also snubbed), trigger locks on guns, a woman's right to choose, foreign aid, and sufficient heat for the poor black residents of the slums he owned in Raleigh.

And that is what the left owes Helms. Although Jerry Falwell and Strom Thurmond did their best to stir up progressives, it was often Jesse who spurred the American left into battle through his vehement opposition to its basic principles. His vitriol helped to kick-start a great deal of progressive action. To liberals, he was a villain in the mold of Darth Vader, though he would probably not have hired James Earl Jones, a black actor, to speak through his face grille. Nevertheless, Helms made of himself a flashpoint, helping to appall and galvanize first the civil rights movement, then AIDS activists of the '80s, '90s and beyond.

The actual positives are refreshingly brief. On Helms' retirement, the New York Times claimed that "few senators in the modern era [had] done more to buck the tide of progress ... than Mr. Helms," but if one looks carefully at his history, one can see a tale of molasses-paced adjustment to modern times, not unlike the changing values of the Roman Catholic Church, which pardoned Galileo -- in 1992 -- for his outrageous claim that Earth revolved around the sun. At that rate, Helms might have caught up with today's progressive politics had he lived until 2128. He opposed AIDS funding at the height of the crisis, but toward the end of his life, he reconsidered. Apparently AIDS in Africa had not spread through the actions of "degenerate" and "morally sick" homosexuals, but through heterosexual contact -- presumably always innocent -- and he joined forces with Bono to garner $600 million for AIDS relief around the world. He expressed remorse for not having gotten involved sooner. Dennis Rader, Wichita's "BTK" serial killer, has also expressed remorse for what he did.

There was something else, too ... Oh yeah, in 1978, Helms hired a black man, James Meredith, to work on his staff. A very charitable gesture indeed, considering his former views on race relations: "White people," warned an ad campaign he helped design for Strom Thurmond's 1948 run for the White House as a third-party segregationist, "do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories?" For the youngsters, let's note that the question was rhetorical, and at the time, the only answer would have been a resounding no, followed by the firing of sawed-off shotguns and the frenzied barking of German Shepherds hungry for Negro flesh. As the New Yorker pointed out in 2001, however, quoting Walter Russell Meade, once the civil rights bills of the 1960s were signed into law, Helms "obeyed them," which was, to coin a Southernism, mighty white of the guy.

Helms and his wife adopted a child with cerebral palsy. Beyond these lovely gestures (and doubtless, a myriad of small, unrecorded acts of kindness), it becomes necessary to fluff a bit. Although Sen. Helms came quite late to the AIDS table and supported Argentinian juntas, Roberto D'Aubuisson of Salvadoran death-squad fame, and the brutal regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, to our knowledge he never killed anyone with his bare hands. The same cannot be said for Dennis Rader. Such an up-close-and-personal sort of violence -- unless it involved a stout caning or dueling pistols -- would have been ungentlemanly, and Helms was nothing if not the model of a Southern gentleman. A mid-19th-century Southern gentleman. When he upheld "freedom," he always seemed to imply the "freedom" of wealthy white folks from manual labor. Despite his adoration of dictators, he opposed Stalin's labor camps. Possibly he objected only to the décor -- the source isn't clear.

Though not as quotable or charismatic as Reagan, Helms did possess a certain kind of wit, though he always used it in the service of ultraconservative values, as one New York Times compilation of his bons mots attests. (The one about Clinton's "uncertain saxophone" remains amusing partly because it represents a rare moment when Helms chose to kick someone while he was up.)

Radical right-wing politicians of today often try to avoid Helms' brashness, though it was effective in its day -- his ban on travel into the United States by HIV-positive people remains in effect. The right wing has learned the value of secrecy and spin, of rendition abroad, of "plausible deniability" and "unknown unknowns." Compared with the spooky closed-door corruption and surveillance lust of the Bush administration, Helms' outspoken inappropriateness and knee-jerk intransigence now look at best quaint and ill-advised, at worst tragically myopic. It is probably better, even for him, after his long illness, that he has passed on to the plantation in the sky. As a man of African descent and a woman named Clinton were getting a real chance at the presidency, as same-sex marriage was becoming a reality across America, as the Republican Party found itself in disarray, as abortion remained legal, as integration and race mixing became widespread, it must have seemed to him, on some deep -- though perhaps only subliminal -- level, that he'd failed to protect America's core values. Despite his Herculean efforts, the barbarians had stormed the gate and rushed in to desecrate the nation's sacred traditions. Goodbye, Mr. Helms. And, barbarians, welcome.