There’s good money waiting to be made by writing a book on the infantilization of American culture. Anyone who wishes to write that book should make sure to watch the re-broadcast of yesterday’s congressional hearing into steroid use in baseball, and take copious notes.

Donald Hooton, who blames the suicide of his teenaged son Taylor on steroids, issued what he seemed to think was a damning challenge to ballplayers when he asked, “Why don’t you behave like we try to teach our kids to behave?”

Several hours later, Rep. Paul Kanjorski, a Democrat of Pennsylvania, told Commissioner Bud Selig and union chief Donald Fehr, “You need to back off from this collective bargaining,” as if the idea of labor and management negotiating together was somehow sinister and contrary to democratic ideals. He then asked how baseball was any different from junior high or high school, and seemed to suggest that the appropriate response to a positive drug test would be for management to summon law enforcement.

From citizens unable to comprehend why anyone wouldn’t expect grown men to behave like children, to elected representatives unable to distinguish between a group of highly skilled professionals and a group of 12- and 13-year-olds, this hearing was filled with people who wish to hold adults to the standards of children.

Rightly enough, children are not considered responsible enough to make choices for themselves – but adults make their own choices, and those choices include the choice to take drugs or to break the law. What the legal consequences are for an athlete who uses steroids is a fitting subject for legislation. The professional consequences are not; they’re a matter for negotiation between unions and employers. This is not a distinction any congressmen cared to make yesterday.

Not that this was the only way congressmen found to embarrass themselves. For instance, Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat of Maryland, betrayed an unhealthy fascination with the mechanics of urine collection, perhaps fearing that ballplayers would use a prosthetic device like the “Whizzinator,” recently made famous by the actor Tom Sizemore.

Senator Bunning, a Republican of Kentucky, invoked Ronald Reagan’s famous phrase, “Trust but verify,” implicitly comparing steroids to the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union. Rep. Mark Souder, a Republican of Indiana, bizarrely referred to ballplayers as “pushers” and “dealers.” And fringe lunatic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat of Ohio, speaking to Sammy Sosa in Spanish as if the home-run champion weren’t bilingual, will stay in my memory for a long time as a perfect example of the sort of unthinking condescension typical of a certain political class.

But when congressmen start invoking the phrase “collective bargaining” as if it held the same overtones as the phrase “Salafist expansionism,” and people like Donald Hooton are taken seriously when they say things like, “Right to privacy? What about out rights as parents?” the matter ceases to be merely ludicrous. It is actively dangerous.

The key was the suggestion, made by Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat of California, and echoed several times throughout the hearing by his fellow congressmen, that baseball and the other major sports ought to be subordinated to the same testing protocols that govern the Olympics and other international competitions – and that college and high-school athletic programs ought to be, as well.

No matter how many times Olympic protocols are referred to as “the gold standard” by congressmen who apparently have no idea what they’re talking about, they remain a joke. That baseball’s testing procedures are even less stringent is no credit to the game, but the persistence of major doping scandals in the Olympics does little to reassure anyone about the quality of their practice.

This needn’t reflect poorly on the World Anti-Doping Agency and other bodies tasked with drug testing – the fact is, drug design is ahead of enforcement, and will remain so for the foreseeable future – but just by treating international drug policy as some sort of lofty standard to which baseball should aspire, the members of the Government Reform Committee showed themselves to be out for nothing but easy answers.

This was a marked contrast to Selig, who in a rare fit of reasonableness said that “behavior modification should be the most important goal of our policy,” seeming to imply an awareness of the limitations of testing.

The protocols which Waxman seems so eager to impose on everyone from the Yankees to the West Tuscaloosa girls’ racquetball squad have another major flaw besides their ineffectiveness, which is that athletes don’t actually have to test positive to be banned from competition. Last year, for example, the track star Kelli White was suspended for two years for what is called a “non-analytical positive,” which is a nice way of saying she was banned on the basis of circumstantial evidence.

This isn’t a very American idea, though it does seem to slake the thirst for righteousness of those to whom words like “privacy” and “negotiation” are mere Jesuitry behind which needle-clutching fiends cower.

Worst of all, though, is the mere idea of regulating all organized athletic competition under one set of standards. Is there not a thought for the sheer moral idiocy of seriously proposing that grown men and women be held to the same standards as pimply 14-year-old boys?

Apparently not. From everything we heard yesterday, it appears that our elected representatives think that athletes are merely abnormally developed children, who should submit their bodily fluids to international inspection because, as Donald Hooton puts it, “It’s a real challenge for parents to overcome the strong message that’s sent by [their] behavior.”

Which is all fine and well – but when the government stops making distinctions between children and adults of one class, how long before they stop making that distinction at all?