Okay, I understand that; we all have hang-ups. I’m admittedly a little uncomfortable around clowns. But Lafferty’s protest begs the questions, Is there anything that Christian conservatives aren’t afraid of? and Why the hell aren’t these people afraid of one another?

Serial killers, rapists, crazy people with sharp objects, cancer, nightmares, well-made horror movies, large bugs, vicious animals, and thermo-nuclear war are all very scary. Malls? Mannequins? Not so much.

But don’t try to tell that to Marti Ross of West Springfield, Virginia. She apparently believes that Victoria’s Secret is the gateway to Hell. When she saw the window display, she told Matthew Barakat of the Associated Press, “It feels like evil, feels like I have to cross the evil to get to the light."

Steina Rubin of Bethesda is just as concerned with what she witnessed at the mall, and also shocked at her own reaction. She told The Washington Post “I’m not entering a whorehouse. I come to the mall with my daughter. It’s disgusting and I’m from Europe!”

Yes, Europe — the boil on the ass of the world, apparently.

But twenty-two year old Victoria’s Secret shopper Jennifer Kern saw it differently. According to the McLean Connection, she thinks people are overreacting to the display. “I like the way it looks,” she said. “It is really different from other stores and it has a lot more variety. The lingerie on the models is sexier, but I mean, they are not real people — they are mannequins.”

Exactly. Mannequins.

Another shopper, Iyon Rosario, told The Washington Post, "I love it… Every woman has a little bit of the dark side in her…The mannequins aren't real. I have a husband, and I know he would love this. This is what keeps you happily married.”

Bingo!

The only lesbians in Victoria’s Secret’s windows are in the eyes of the beholders. Some shoppers see ‘happily ever after’; some see a life-size diorama of the “lesbians” that straight men enjoy looking at in magazines and videos; and others, like Ms. Lafferty and her uptight supporters, see the “lesbians” of Sodom. But in reality, what everyone is reacting to is the depiction of girl on girl sex — straight girl on straight girl sex.

That truth is a buzz kill for Lafferty and her homophobic clan, but it’s hardly a revelation to her or anyone else. In the same way Dorothy always knew how get out of Oz without the help of a fairy princess, straight folks know how escape a stale sexual relationship with out the help of a real lesbian. They’ve been doing it for years.

I want to have faith in the horny yet homophobic public. I want to believe that one day soon everyone will admit to knowing the difference between real lesbians, plastic lesbians, porn-video lesbians and TV lesbians. But I doubt that will happen soon. The fantasies are too valuable to give up — valuable to everyone except lesbians, that is.

Lafferty will continue to morph fiction into fact to further her Christian conservative agenda and keep the world safe from homosexuals; men are apparently hard-wired, unable to dislodge themselves from the notion that lesbians desire and need them; and advertisers and the media know that there’s a lot of money to be made at the expense of the “L” word.

All except lesbians are profiting off a lie or, at the very least, a gross exaggeration: a lesbian’s life mirrors a porn video. And this type of exploitation makes me wonder if there’s ever been another group of people who have been so publicly and equally disliked and desired at the same time — all as a result of the same distorted premise.