San Francisco- “Honestly, most of the guys would have to recuse themselves.”

— FBI agent, on the bureau’s new focus on fighting porn

OK, OK. I obviously don’t have my priorities straight. Here I’ve spent the last few columns bewailing the chaotic state of the Gulf Coast and the Iraq War, when I should have been writing about porn. Forgive me!

Of course, we’ve all been silly! See, for the past four years we’ve watched our civil rights erode in the name of The War on Terror. Some have even accepted these changes, reasoning that personal freedom shrivels in comparison to protecting The Childrenâ„¢ from … er … religious extremists who would violate their civil rights. That’s just wrong, wrong, wrong thinking. There’s a bigger battle to be fought, and thank God our government is stepping up to the plate.

The Sept. 20 Washington Post reports that eight FBI agents, a supervisor and sundry support staff have been diverted from the aforementioned War on Terror to fight a more formidable foe. Yes. They have been recruited for The War on Porn. In August, says the Post, the bureau’s Washington Field Office began gathering agents “for a new anti-obscenity squad, ‘one of the top priorities’ of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.”

Let others waste their time tracking Al Qaeda. The intrepid anti-obscenity squad will dig up dirt on “manufacturers and purveyors” of pornography — not kiddie porn, not snuff films, not rape videos, mind, but the busty, slurping stuff that our coworkers peep on their computers when their supervisor isn’t looking. In a word, smut. The kind made by adults, targeting adults and featuring adults in brain-twisting but perfectly legal acts of carnal gymnastics.

Dudes: Forget hijackers and hurricanes. Smut, according to Gonzalez, is among the greatest threats facing America in the 21st century. This is where we should focus our attention; this is the fight that our tax dollars should fund. I feel safer already. Want to scan my hard drive before I board that plane? Sure. Anything to keep America free. Anything to hold religious extremists at bay, because … oh. Never mind.

The Post also noted that some at the FBI are less than enthusiastic about their new assignments: “I guess this means we’ve won the war on terror,” said one bemused FBI agent. Opined another: “Honestly, most of the guys would have to recuse themselves.”

Officially, the FBI’s priority list runs like so: Protecting the United States from terrorist attack, foreign espionage, cyber-based attacks and public corruption; following up are civil rights, organized crime, white-collar crime and significant violent crime. Where does porn fit in to this? It doesn’t. Yet policing my neighbors’ virtual sex lives is now bigger than the Bomb, more important than Enron stealing its investors’ money and scarier than the Mafia. I’ve got it now, and I won’t forget.

Still… I’m confused. How many Guantanamo Bays will it take to house all the new sex criminals? Pornography has grown as mainstream as hip-hop and Wonder Bread. Porn stars like Jenna Jameson are pop culture icons; every hotel chain in the world has a pay-for-view adult channel. With free previews, even! A few years back, I was staying in a Madrid business-class hotel with my elderly Lithuanian mama when we channel-surfed right into a bout of televised fellatio. I turned red and sputtered with… um … with outrage. Mama, who once faced down Hitler, merely looked bored.

So. Porn is everywhere, and our government is taking the funds it diverted from disaster preparedness to the Iraq War and diverting them to The War on Porn. It’s also funding abstinence-only sex education, ignoring the fact that statistics, history and human nature all demonstrate that people do, in fact, have sex before marriage and would benefit from a little information on how to avoid fatal viruses and unwanted pregnancies. Never mind that the United States has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the Western world, while Sweden and the Netherlands, which provide ample information on things like condom usage, have the lowest. In fact, studies show that the rate of pregnancy in Sweden is four times lower than in the United States, even though Swedish teenagers are more sexually active. (Bet they watch porn, too.)

Instead we blunder on, convincing bright-eyed teenagers to join the Silver Ring Thing, a profitable abstinence shtick developed by a Christian ministry that involves selling no-sex-please rings to kids. All for naught! Like Britney Spears — the chastity movement’s fallen spokesperson — about 90 percent of these same kids wind up breaking their vows and getting it on, anyway, sans contraception. Maybe that’s because their parents are too busy watching porn to police their children.

Weird, isn’t it, the dichotomy we live in? On the one hand, we’re scarfing down pornography like salted peanuts. On the other, everyone’s becoming a born-again virgin. Girls Gone Wild and abstinence are a match made in someone’s hypocritical heaven, a marriage born of conflict and made for tragedy. Maybe the FBI should stop trying to deny the libido and harness it, instead. Encourage adult sites to feature more pop-up condom ads. Whatever, man. Anything beats a world filled with porn police and chastity belts.

As for me, I’ll take Jenna Jameson over Jenna Bush any day.