To a small but influential section of liberals and ultraliberals, Flynt is the standard-bearer for liberty, his publication a benchmark for free expression. In a country which has made a fetish of unconstrained freedom, the central article of faith is the constitution's First Amendment, which promises the right of free expression. And Flynt has been in the forefront of landmark cases involving this tenet, stretching the very limits of free expression.

As theshameless pornographer himself once aptly put it, ``If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you. Because I'm the worst.''

Worst, he certain is. A redneck huckster from Middle America, Flynt gained notoriety in the 1970s by parlaying a string of seedy strip joints in Ohio into a porn empire. His specialty was violence and bestiality. Hustler magazine, the flagship of his skin kingdom, revelled in provocatively pushing the frontiers of porn with limitless depravity towards, and degradation of, women. It depicted `features' like `Dirty Pool,' in which a woman was shown being gang-raped at a snooker table, `The Naked and the Dead' in which a woman in handcuffs is being beaten and raped in a concentration camp setting, and `Dead Meat' in which a woman is being fed into a meatgrinder.

Flynt defends such sickening excesses as free expression, often positing it against war. In the 1998 movie People Vs Larry Flynt, a gripping but one-sided eulogy to his fight for freespeech, the porn master cleverly subverts the debate. In one hopelessly romanticised moment in the film (brilliantly directed by the Czech film maker Milos Forman), Flynt is shown extolling sexual expression. ``What is more obscene, sex or war?'' he asks, against the backdrops of cuts between a skin flick and shots of Hiroshima, Nazis marching, and the My Lai massacre. Forgotten at that moment are the excesses he has unleashed against the feminine spirit. ``The price you have to pay for a free society is toleration,'' a fatuous Flynt said later in one interview. ``People have to tolerate the Larry Flynts of the world.''

Flynt has suddenly become the cynosure in the sex scandal roiling Washington for the past year. A hardcore Clinton supporter, he put out a full page advertisement in the Washington Post last November offering $1 million in cash to any woman who came forward with evidence of an adulterous sexual encounter with current members of Congress or high-ranking government officials. Several have. Thepurpose of this sexual bounty hunting: to expose the hypocrisy of politicians out to nail Clinton for marital infidelities.

Many liberals, especially writers and journalists, look upon Flynt as a frontiersman who built the levee against the conservative tide to limit freedom of expression. In one Hustler issue that resulted in his becoming a cause celebre (and graduated him from notoriety to faux fame), Flynt ran a parody of a religious leader, Rev. Jerry Falwell, depicting the latter in a drunken, incestuous encounter with his mother. Falwell sued him for emotional distress. A Virginia jury found Flynt guilty and awarded Falwell $200,000.

But Flynt took the case to the Supreme Court, arguing that the lower court's ruling would make it easier for public officials to muzzle criticism and satire. The Supreme Court upheld his contention, although obscenity is one of the few categorical exceptions to the First Amendment (the judgment, incidentally, was written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who ispresiding over the ongoing impeachment trial). Thus was born Flynt, the free speech crusader. To liberals, the verdict was among the first to expand First Amendment protections, after years of conservatism had narrowed the definition of free speech.

The verdict also allowed Flynt to rail against religion and government. Famously, he said then, ``There's nothing more political than sex. The church has had its hand on our crotch for more than 2,000 years, and the government is moving in that direction.'' In purely political terms though, he has always been somewhat of a maverick. In 1984, he took on a Republican avatar and briefly ran a whimsical campaign for the Presidential ticket, saying ``I am white, wealthy, pornographic, and I've been shot because of what I believed in,'' presumably a dig at Reagan. Indeed, several years before, he had been shot at by sniper outside a Georgia courtroom and paralysed for life below his waist (he is permanently disabled and uses a wheelchair). Only recently, it hasemerged from a confession that he was shot by a white racist who was outraged over a interracial photo spread in Hustler.

More recently, he has leaned towards the Democrats. Flynt is sympathetic to Clinton, but that does not stop Hustler from shredding the President. In a recent issue, the magazine published a gross photo spread showing how Clinton's DNA could have landed on Monica's blue cocktail dress. ``Smut is my vocation. Politics is my hobby,'' he said in one interview. The porn master says he is outraged by what he feel is a withhunt launched by Starr and Republicans against Clinton. Ken Starr, he said recently, ``did more in two weeks than I have done in a quarter century to make pornography available to a wider audience.''

Although a conservative on political issues, he is a liberal on personal matters. To him, the debate is not whether Larry Flynt has the right to sell his magazine; it's whether John Smith has the right to buy the magazine. As long as there's one person in the world who wantsHustler, he should be able to buy it. And Larry Flynt should be able to publish it. Clever argument, until the magazine ambushes you on the newstand. But Flynt is unapologetic.

Clapped into the clink many years ago, he wailed, ``All I am guilty of is bad taste.''

Ha, bad taste is bad understatement. In his autobiography, Flynt claims to have had sex with a chicken. No wonder when he announced his $1 million bounty for dirt on Congressmen, a wag remarked, ``I will give a million dollars to anyone who can dig up something clean about Larry Flynt.''