Dr. Laura Schlessinger will be in Harrisburg Tuesday — in voice and image, if not in person — to express her disapproval over Penn State's Sex Faire, state Rep. John Lawless (R-Montgomery) said in an interview yesterday.

The talk-show host plans to appear via satellite at 2 p.m. in the Capitol Media Center following Penn State President Graham Spanier's 11:30 a.m. appearance before the state House Appropriations Committee.

Lawless said representatives of Schlessinger's production company contacted him to arrange the event, and he reserved the press room in his name. However, Lawless said he has not yet personally spoken to Schlessinger.

Will the state representative be in attendance?

"Absolutely," he said.

Schlessinger, who received her Ph.D. in physiology, recently spoke out about the Feb. 3 student-run event on her nationally syndicated radio program.

"It is inconceivable that someone who has had to fight so hard for the past year to protect her own right to free speech, such as Dr. Laura, would have anything to do with attacking the free speech of a small group of university students," said Penn State spokesman Bill Mahon.

The co-directors of Womyn's Concerns, Lynn Thompson and Missy Mazzaferro, were unavailable for comment yesterday.

"We feel that the purpose and nature of the Sex Faire have been misrepresented and obscured in the uproar surrounding it. The event itself was a small one, the furor much larger," they wrote in a recent opinion piece about the event.

Womyn's Concerns set up the five-hour Sex Faire in Pollock Rec Room with about $50 of student-raised funds.

The event included anatomically correct gingerbread cookies, games such as Orgasm Bingo and Pin the Clitoris on the Vulva, short seminars on topics including alternative contraception and cervical exams, and tables with erotic literature and information on HIV/AIDS.

The Tent of Consent, which organizers designed to teach students about consent in relationships, was closed for the entire event because of a request by university administrators.

Lawless and a cameraman visited the Faire to shoot video and interview students. Lawless plans to show a five-minute excerpt of that video to his fellow legislators at the committee meeting Tuesday. He said he released preview copies of the tape to Penn State and other news outlets.

The representative said he will question Spanier about the appropriateness of Sex Faire and Cuntfest, another program by Womyn's Concerns that triggered controversy last November.

Spanier will appear before the appropriations committee to lobby for more state funding. The president wants to focus, as he does each spring, on showing legislators how the overall university helps the state, Mahon said.

"The spin doctors are at work here," Lawless said of the Penn State administrators. "They're backed into a corner. You think they're a little worried?"

Mahon disagreed, noting that Lawless has not shown how he could legally form an oversight board to censor speech at Penn State.

"Free speech is incredibly important," Mahon said. "The events that happened at Penn State; they were expression. One lawmaker wants to make a circus of this and ignore the law. He's being very unreasonable . . . trying to bully the university."