The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

I love kissing. In fact, I was just telling my boyfriend the other night that it's one of my favorite pastimes to enjoy with him (who needs baseball?). And the government used to love that I loved kissing. In fact, it titillated them so much that they were just a little bit scared. But suddenly, the Bush Administration isn't so interested in the whereabouts of my tongue, and as a result, several people at the Pentagon are probably out of a job now.

It wasn't so long ago that the Department of Defense considered a same-sex kiss nothing less than an act of potential terrorism. As Servicemembers Legal Defense Network first learned in December 2005, the DoD was using its now infamous TALON database to peep into keyholes across the country. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was satisfying his voyeuristic fetish by sending government agents to check-in on anti-war protestors, Quakers and gays. After looking in on one "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" protest on a university campus, the Defense Department labeled the demonstration a potential terror threat.

Was Al Qaeda on campus? Had the insurgency infiltrated the commons area? No . . . it was even worse. A few LGBT students decided to hold a kiss-in while calling for repeal of the military's ban on gays.

A same-sex kiss, you see, may constitute terrorist activity.

Or at least, that is, it may have until today. This morning brought the surprising news that the Pentagon is no longer interested in watching us make out. (Mark Foley and David Vitter, perhaps, raised the bar for scintillating sexual conduct just a little higher.)

Yes, the Department of Defense is doing away with TALON, and the Washington Post notes that "the amount and quality of information being gathered had declined." And so the point is clear: You haven't been kissing often enough, or passionately enough. You've let the Pentagon down by refusing to get it up.

But take heart . . . not all is lost.

This is, yes, a certain victory for civil liberties, and we should all celebrate this small step toward individual rights and sexual privacy. The exhibitionist in us, though, might feel a bit left out in the cold. After all, what's more exciting than the thought of all those military intelligence boys at DoD getting a kick out of your kisses?