Watching naked ladies, as everyone knows, can turn a kid toward politics or religion. : Gary Hart Did It

This is not a good time for sin in the San Fernando Valley.

Prostitution is in trouble in Van Nuys, booze in Studio City and general pornography just about every place else.

The only permissible forms of public recreation are bowling and walking your dog, and I have some reservation about the scatology that might involve.

Hookers are a traditional target of periodic sweeps by the LAPD up and down Sepulveda Boulevard, its officers fearlessly clamping the angels of evil in irons and hauling them off to the slammer.

The ladies, however, make bail the next day and, a short time later, the same policemen are once more racing up and down Sepulveda Boulevard, fearlessly clamping the same angels of evil in irons and hauling them off to the slammer.

But the ladies make bail the next day and, a short time later, . . . well, you get the idea. It’s like singing “Row Your Boat” in rounds a hundred times a week.

Lately, however, hookers have taken a back seat, so to speak, to booze and hard-core porn, and we have Studio City to thank for that.

Neighborhood activists first said no to a world-class restaurant, claiming that its presence would cause bacchanalian chaos in the community. They envisioned rowdy drunks driving across their lawns and pawing their wives and sisters.

I find this strange because the restaurant in question is the Beverly Hills-based Bistro Garden, not Sneaky Sam’s beer bar and pool hall with country music and live nudes.

The only cowboys in Beverly Hills wear custom-made alligator boots and make million-seller records.

The Bistro was to have been the centerpiece of a $15-million shopping center in Studio City, but the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board was conned into tentatively denying it a liquor license on the basis of neighborhood concern over marauding drunks.

Quite obviously, no one from the ABC has ever been in the current Bistro Garden in Beverly Hills, after which the Studio City restaurant was to have been fashioned.

It is a place for William Morris agents, successful middle-aged actors and doctors who have published books, none of whom are likely to drive over your lawn or covet your sister. Trust me. I know these people.

Nonetheless, the neighbors made enough noise, the liquor board responded and now the Bistro Garden may never open in the San Fernando Valley.

That’s not all those Studio City people did.

They are also responsible for a crackdown on what we call “adult-oriented businesses” within 500 feet of homes anywhere in Los Angeles.

These would include retail establishments of the sort that celebrate (oh my God!) Natural Sexual Functions in their various amiable forms.

Getting them out of the neighborhoods is probably a good idea, however, because watching naked ladies, as everyone knows, can turn a kid toward politics or religion. Nobody wants that.

With this in mind, the activists initiated an anti-smut ordinance that was introduced by Hal Bernson, God’s best friend on the L.A. City Council. It went into effect last week after a grace period during which places like Le Sex Shoppe had the option of moving, applying for a waiver or becoming a bakery.

Anyone making serious money on the Primary Natural Function is vowing to fight the ordinance, so perhaps the fun has just begun. It may be the only fun we’ll have left.

The simultaneous crackdown on whores, booze and porn comes in an era of public disclosures by Gary Hart, Jimmy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart that they might have engaged in all three.

No one really cared that they did, and it all might have gone unnoticed, but the endless talking and weeping over their iniquities has caused a kind of smut backlash in L.A. where sex, if not invented, was at least popularized for the entire family to enjoy.

In more lenient times, hookers were members of the Chamber of Commerce and activists demanded that whole neighborhoods be moved to accommodate topless bars and bottomless massage parlors, rather than the opposite occurring.

Thanks to Hart and the Born Again duet, those days seem gone forever.

The question now becomes where do the adult businesses go? Well, they can’t go next door to parks, churches or schools because those areas are reserved for drug dealers, although smut’s proximity to fundamentalist churches might be reconsidered.

They can, however, move to industrial areas where the guys down at the plant could enjoy their lunch-hour salami sandwiches while watching Debbie do Dallas at a Pussycat Theater.

This would, of course, close the market to white-collar workers and business executives who, while they like their nookie as much as the next guy, would rather die than be caught anywhere near where real work is performed.

This all comes at a good time, I guess. Morality is cyclical. Birth control initiated the age of sexual freedom and disease is shutting it down.

I find poetic justice in the notion that it ends not with a bang but a whimper.