Although the American Sociological Association’s Code of Ethics expects sociologists to disclose all funding sources, the cord does not address the issue of whether sociologists who accept funding from a particular agency may also accept their perspective on what needs to be studied. Lewis Coser (1956:27) has argued that as sociologists in the United States have increasingly turned from basic sociological research to applied research for government agencies and the private sector, “they have relinquished to a large extent the freedom to choose their own problems, substituting the problems of their clients for those which might have interested them on purely theoretical grounds.” Viewed in this light, the importance of government funding for sociological studies troubling questions for those who cherish Weber’s ideal of value neutrality in research. As we’ll see in the next section, applied sociological research on human sexuality has run into barriers constructed by government funding agencies.