I’m fighting the gays in the can so we don’t have to fight them in our own backyard.

That’s in essence the mission statement of Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jim Naugle, the latest in a very long line of Right Wing cranks bent on cleansing his lily white fiefdom of all those pesky homosexuals and their degenerate ways.

His grand design for stemming the lewd rainbow tide threatening to overrun the city? Robotic toilets designed to narc on their copulating occupants by automatically flinging open their stall doors during lurid activity.

If you think the esteemed Mr. Naugle’s proposal sounds like a gay porn parody of Westworld in which technologically advanced urinals turn on their makers, you’re not alone.

There are many citizens who deem a $250,000 expense for pre-set timed toilets a nutso extravagance.

Naugle’s untold hours spent lurking on gay cruising websites — for what amounts to a systemic gay witch hunt — are being widely derided as a massive waste of time.

Jim’s not going to lose sight of his personal crusade, though:

“Sometimes [public restrooms] are used for sexual activity — most of it is men meeting men because it’s same-sex people in the bathrooms” he’s forthrightly stated.

“Such anonymous sexual liaisons create a public health problem and are reportedly occurring in public restrooms throughout communities across America including, but not limited to, children’s parks, Barnes and Noble book stores, Home Depot stores, Bally Total Fitness Health Clubs, airports, and many other locations.”

This is the mindset you end up with when you’re only exposure to the gay public comes from trolling hook-up sites — you start to believe that gay porn is some kind of community standard.

The equation is loopy: Gay men automatically lose control and go into heat at the sight of the health club’s elliptical machine or a hardware store caulking gun, resulting in a frenzied fuck session in the nearest stall.

Nowhere does Naugle mention all the slutty hetero couples wrangling in movie theaters, dry humping in baseball stadiums, or going at it in restrooms. Flamboyance is only ascribed to gays. It’s as if straight people never flaunted their sexuality in public.

You could say Naugle’s self-promotion is a spectacle of hetero blandness. Every other word out his mouth is “family” and his homepage features a domestic photo with all the right ingredients: him looking fatherly seated on a park bench with his cookie-cutter wife, a beaming blonde moppet between them, and a golden retriever in tow. Why, you’d swear that Ft. Lauderdale was Mayberry R.F.D. rather than the city that boasts thirty gay resorts and a hotel construction boom reliant on gay patronage.

Six years of Republican rule have taught nothing if not that big public condemnations of sexual deviancy are all about vicarious exorcism — to protest a bit too much is a dead giveaway that you’re wallowing in kink behind closed doors.

During his tenure as mayor Naugle’s praised a local fundamentalist church that advocates homosexual execution, attempted to block moving the city’s Stonewall Library into a county-leased building because its collection contained “hardcore pornography” (i.e. the works Walt Whitman, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal), and called for a ban on all gay tourists to prevent the spread of AIDS.

That later proposed ban was met with a collective cricket chirp from city board members. With Ft. Lauderdale being a top hot spot for vacationing gays, tourism would take a hit to the tune of one billion dollars a year. You can mess with the gays, but when a Conservative mayor threatens the Free Market, he’s stepped over the line.

A monomaniac’s obsessions with phantom enemies never allows for reality to deter his paranoia.

Local law enforcement has racked up only a single arrest for public sex since 2005 to bolster Naugle’s claims of an epidemic. Civil rights groups are calling him to the mat with a “Flush Jim Naugle” campaign, his political counterparts can’t write him off fast enough as an extremist loon, and a recall effort is galvanizing.

He’s even gone so far as to equate the working poor and the city’s affordable housing law with Communism.

At this point, only the zombified one third Conservative base who thinks Republicans can do no wrong hasn’t been alienated by him. Taking a cue from Great White Dope George Bush, he continues to flout any semblance of sanity or diplomacy in the face of mounting public resistance and disdain.

Every self-appointed Morality Czar needs a throne to preside from. Naugle’s perch is of the quarter-million porcelain variety. Pleasantly enough, his term in office is already circling the bowl.