There seemed to be general agreement that “anything sexy” had special power to damn a man in public life. “I can’t afford to touch it” was an often heard remark, from men who thoroughly approved the bill. The dread of facetious or vulgar comment from other members of Congress was a very real and often indicated dread. A Senator who was defeated for re-election, was horrified at the suggestion that he might help the bill along as a service in the last session of his term. “If I were to vote for this bill, my people wouldn’t let me come home,” he said. Another Senator who sincerely wanted the bill to pass felt very cramped in his advocacy of it, because of the fears of his family, who thought the thing “not nice,” and that it was not good for his reputation to have anything to do with it. In the case of one Representative his fears loomed so large that they encompassed the whole population. “Why,” he said, “if Congress should do such a thing (as to pass the bill) the population would rise like a mob, and the only reason they are not doing it now is because they don’t know it is under consideration.” A Senator whose fear regarding “the fourteen year old girls” was well nigh an obsession and who said, “You want to make everybody prostitutes,”—was able when speaking seriously, to modify his fears only to the extent of saying, “If this information could be confined to the intelligent and cultured people, and kept out of the hands of the vicious and ignorant, it might be another matter, but that can’t be done.” From that, he argued that no one should be allowed to have it, although he had admitted previously in the same conversation that information did circulate anyway in spite of the law. The most striking element in the expression of all these fears has been the way in which the fear, and the sex consciousness which is back of it, seems to prevent the use of the mind in an ordinary logical fashion. Two and two do not make four, but a hundred, or any preposterous number. No conclusion is too absurd to jump at, when impelled by this fuddled embarrassment and vague terror. Some of the most squeamish members have taken refuge in the stout declaration that they have never heard of the bill and don’t know anything about it, or about the subject of birth control; and this in spite of the fact that they had received many letters and much literature for over five years. They have been so occupied in devising ways to wriggle out of discussing the bill at all, that they failed to realize how they gave themselves away, within a few minutes after they knew “nothing about it,” by telling of how they had talked the matter over with other members and they all agreed that “nothing can be done about it in this session.”