I'm not going to try to hide it, I went to last week's Sex Faire. Hey, it was 7 p.m. on a Saturday, and the board games didn't start in the HUB until 10 p.m. — I mean, what the hell else did I have to do?

I had been following the Sex Faire controversy from day one. I heard the rantings of state Rep. John A. Lawless, R-Montgomery. And from what he was saying, this Sex Faire, which was funded by Womyn's Concerns, was going to be straight out of the Spice Channel.

So as I started my journey towards Pollock Commons, my brain was going full-steam. Would there be semi-nude people wandering around, reading the Karma Sutra? Would there be women serving drinks in clothing that had merely been painted onto their bodies? The way that Lawless portrayed the Sex Faire in his press interviews, any one of these visions could have been possible.

Upon entering Pollock Commons, however, I was surprised to see no undulating bodies or writhing piles of hot flesh.

The Sex Faire, as it turns out, did not turn Pollock Commons into a lusty bordello of carnal pleasure, but instead, turned it into a place where one could have an informative time learning about things like consent, erogenous zones, disease and the human body in general.

Part of me felt cheated. Where was the hard-core action that had been promised? But then I realized, that the only person that had promised hard-core action was Lawless.

So when Lawless finally made his promised appearance, he seemed to be the most pathetic kid on the block. He had traveled all of the way from Montgomery County to be the premiere party pooper at what he had envisioned to be a Nittany Lion orgy. Instead, all he got served up was a swarm of faces that couldn't figure out why a state representative was spending his time at a tiny event funded by a shoestring.

Seeing Lawless wade around the room, asking tough questions regarding anatomically correct gingerbread cookies made me wonder why he chose to crash the Sex Faire. At first, I wrote Lawless off as another puritanical Pennsylvanian lawmaker, bent on legislating morality wherever he deems fit.

However, upon examining Lawless' record of dealings with Penn State, I realized that his attacks on last weekend's Sex Faire and last November's Cuntfest were less about his personal feelings about morality and more about a strange vendetta that he holds against state-funded higher education in general.

Since becoming a state representative in 1991, it appears that Lawless has had it in for state university system and related state schools. For some reason, it seems like he feels that he and the rest of Pennsylvania are being cheated by having to finance these academic foundations. And for the last ten years, every time that he has had a chance, he has attempted to undermine state funds to collegiate education.

For example, in 1995, Lawless was appointed chairperson of a House select committee on higher education. From this pulpit, Lawless blasted professor sabbaticals, time spent in classrooms, research spending and travel abroad spending. And in a tremendous feat of legislative integrity, he even used the report of the committee's findings as a forum to accuse several high-ranking members of the state university system of being involved in a marital affair, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Fortunately for the universities, most people didn't buy into Lawless' own unique brand of academic McCarthyism. Fellow representatives blasted Lawless' "witch hunt," and the state System of Higher Education felt so affronted that Lawless would have the audacity to accuse university officials of having an affair, that they pulled out of the hearings all together.

Lawless, realizing that people were not buying into his specious claims of professor corruption, decided to move on to another target. In 1996, Lawless came out against Penn State football. Owing to the fact that too much taxpayer money is spent on the program, Lawless refused to go to games anymore, stating, "It's Joe (Paterno), Mom and apple pie up there in Happy Valley."

I don't think anyone was exactly sure what he meant, but the message was clear; John Lawless was pissed.

In his anger, Lawless seemed to have forgotten an important fact about Pennsylvania — namely, that Pennsylvania citizens love Penn State football. Lawless wasn't able to raise a torch mob to burn down Beaver Stadium, so he quickly moved on to another means of attacking university funding.

At last, Lawless found the controversial topic that could lead him to the Promised Land of reduced university funding. He had discovered sex, and he was going to ride it for all it was worth. Lawless' sex romp started in 1997, when he threw up his arms in anger over a Penn State student's painting of the Virgin Mary that was being displayed in an outdoor exhibit. He felt that the sexual nature of the painting desecrated the Virgin Mary, and that taxpayers' funds shouldn't be used to finance such offensive endeavors.

Never mind that the student had paid for the painting material on her own. That little fact didn't matter, because Lawless had gotten what he wanted -- a soundbite about how he was standing up against smut on behalf of the Pennsylvania taxpayers. And since that moment, Lawless has made the crusade against obscenity at Penn State his tool of choice for whittling down state funding to universities.

It turns out that John Lawless is no Puritan. No, he is nothing more than a political opportunist, willing to trample on the First Amendment if it gets him to his goal of reducing funding to state universities. He tried attacking professors, and he tried attacking football, but people only started to listen when he started attacking "taxpayer-funded" sexual indecencies. Maybe the reason that Lawless doesn't like universities is because he realizes that he is the antithesis of what higher education attempts to instill in a person. He epitomizes closed-minded thinking. Whatever the reason for his vendetta, all I know is that as I watched him wander around Pollock Commons last weekend surreptitiously glancing at the table that displayed "foods that enhanced sex," I couldn't help thinking to myself, "What a sad, strange little man."