01:00 AM EST on Friday, February 18, 2005

OVER THE PAST three years, millions in taxpayer dollars have been spent to tell young people the following lies:

Touching a person's genitals can cause pregnancy; the AIDS virus can be spread through sweat; up to 10 percent of women who have abortions become sterile.

No wonder the restless spirit of Alfred C. Kinsey seems to be troubling the American imagination these days. Dr. Kinsey: he of the bow tie and cupcake hairdo. Such an unlikely champion of desire.

Kinsey's pioneering research on human sexuality pushed back a heavy curtain of ignorance and with it, much silent suffering. Amid all the jokes and nervous laughter, Kinsey instructed and reassured millions. He was, to be sure, a flawed man. But in the end, his was a career of compassion.

If the traditional-values folks continue to have their way with federal policy (abstinence-only education is just the beginning), it could soon appear that Kinsey needn't have bothered. Fear and fairy tales will replace knowledge and understanding. Our terrified children will start from scratch.

On Valentine's Day, public television broadcast a documentary about Kinsey. It was a useful supplement to last year's biopic starring Liam Neeson. Kinsey the movie offered a largely heroic portrait of the man who spent years recording Americans' sexual practices. The documentary (also called Kinsey) offered more glimpses of the man's shortcomings.

As a shy young zoology professor at Indiana University, Kinsey at first studied insects. He became fascinated by the seemingly infinite variations within one lowly species, the gall wasp. Around the same time, owing to difficulties he and his wife encountered when first married, he began studying the literature on human sexuality.

As a scientist, he was appalled at how little was based on empirical evidence. In 1938, after 10 years' study (and in the midst of a venereal-disease epidemic), he announced a new course on human sexuality. Hundreds of students (many about to marry) lined up to register.

The next year, Kinsey began collecting the sexual histories that would become the basis of his two landmark studies, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).

Although his methodology was later faulted, he induced millions to consider that the range of "normal" behavior was much broader than they had assumed, and included homosexuality.

Today, post - sexual revolution, it is almost impossible to imagine the relief Kinsey's reports must have inspired. (One gay man interviewed in the documentary recalls the despair he felt when he saw "the homosexual" pictured in a purported textbook of "criminal types." It seemed to him he might as well have been looking at his own photograph.)

The response to Kinsey's work was, at first, positive. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male became a best-seller. Kinsey even won the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

But a reaction set in. Cut off fairly early by Indiana University, Kinsey and his three-man team of assistants eventually lost their funding from the Rockefeller Foundation as well.

Kinsey became depressed. In 1956, he died of a heart attack.

Plenty have found fault with the man. He and his wife were both openly intimate with other partners (men included, in Kinsey's case). Their example led to some irreparable wounds among his associates, whom he encouraged to experiment. And later in life, Kinsey's personal investigations turned increasingly to sexual masochism.

Yet, to undertake his journey, Alfred Kinsey had to defy an extraordinarily controlling and sexually repressed father (to say nothing of a repressed era). That he did so comes across in both film treatments as a breathtaking act of courage.

Kinsey was highly driven and pushed his assistants hard. One of them, a now graying Paul Gebhard, was interviewed for the documentary. He recalled 14-hour days and 6-day weeks as the crew amassed thousands of histories.

In retrospect, they made hay while the sun shone. Among today's would-be sex researchers, intimidation is running high. In the summer of 2003, Congress came very close to pulling the plug on a number of respected individual studies. Researchers seeking grants to look at sexual behavior say that unless they use highly coded language, their proposals are all but doomed.

According to a recent New York Times report, the Traditional Values Coalition, a group made up of thousands of churches, has protested $100 million worth of government-funded research, much of it involving sexual behavior. Yet, given the spread of AIDS, much of this work is potentially life-saving.

Alfred Kinsey paid a high personal price for his inquiries. He would surely grieve to see us cycling backward into a climate of whispered half-truths and guilt. It was never that Kinsey understood better than anyone else the laws of attraction. Rather, his gift was the hope that we might throw off a crippling sense of sin, and understand how profoundly we are not just moral beings but physical ones.

M.J. Andersen is a member of The Journal's editorial board.