Anaheim fourth-grade teacher, Dennis William Gosnell, 32, of Tustin, was arrested at a motel on charges of prostitution. According to undercover vice officers, Gosenell offered to perform a sexual act for money with a male undercover officer.

Police started to investigate Gosnell after receiving a tip that he was advertising his services on several gay escort service web sites.

In August, an Oakland teacher was also arrested on charges of prostitution. She claimed she couldn’t live on a teacher’s salary.

Gosnell is on leave now from his job as a teacher. And, because the matter was so publicized in the press, it’s doubtful that a return to his teaching post is feasible.

Assuming he is convicted of the offense, he may lose his license to teach because California, like most states, makes conviction of certain sex crimes grounds for revoking a teaching credential. But, even assuming he’s not convicted of a sex crime, he could have his license revoked for engaging in an act involving moral turpitude.

Ironically, historically, just admitting to being gay in California was considered an act of moral turpitude.

In 1967, for example, a California court upheld the State Board of Education’s revoking of a gay man’s teaching credential. The court found that same-sex behavior had long been contrary and abhorrent to the social mores and moral standards of the people of the state since antiquity. Such behavior was clearly immoral within the meaning of the state’s education code. It could also be “unprofessional conduct” because same-sex behavior “certainly constituted” evident unfitness for service in the public school system.”

The teacher in the ’67 case admitted to having a “homosexual problem” since he was 20.

In 1969, however, the California Supreme Court held that private same-sex conduct between adults was not proof of unfitness to teach. There, a married man admitted that he had a brief gay affair with a teacher. He informed the school board about its gay teacher. The school board revoked the gay teacher’s credential to teach. The Court reversed the action, stating that homosexuality alone does not indicate unfitness to teach.

The Court pointed out, however, that the teacher had not engaged in sodomy or oral copulation with the married man (remember that gay sex was not legalized until 1975.) Since there was no violation of criminal law, said the court, simply being gay did not indicate unfitness to teach.

But, in later cases, the courts upheld revoking the credential of male teachers who were charged with engaging in public sex.

In 1974, an appellate court held that a male teacher’s performance of an act of oral copulation in a doorless toilet stall in a public restroom in a department store during store hours, for which he had been convicted of engaging in an act of prostitution, indicated a serious defect of moral character, normal prudence and good common sense, and therefore evinced an unfitness to teach.

But that same year the California Supreme Court faced another revocation of a teacher’s license. This time, however, the case involved a female teacher, a heterosexual, who attended a “swingers’ party” in Los Angeles. Undercover cops arrested her for engaging in oral sex with a man not her husband. She subsequently lost her credential to teach.

The case went before the California Supreme Court, which upheld her firing the revocation of the credential. But two of the judicial heavyweights on the Court, wrote separate dissenting opinions.

One opinion, by Justice Matthew Torbriner, noted that in determining whether discipline is authorized, a criminal conviction has no talismanic significance. He noted that a teacher convicted of possession of marijuana was not evidence of unfitness to teach.

The criminal conduct must be evaluated in relationship to one’s ability to teach. Here, Torbriner noted, the oral sex was consensual, and 95 percent of American men and women had experienced orgasm in this “illegal” way. He went on to note that the sexual act did not affect, “and could not have affected, [her] teaching ability. The whole matter would have been forgotten and lost in the limbo of the privacy of its occurrence if it had not been clandestinely observed by means of a surreptitious intrusion which reminds one of the surveillance of restrooms which this court has condemned.”

The commission of a sex act, surreptitiously observed, not disclosed to fellow teachers or to pupils, not remotely adversely affecting a teacher’s teaching ability, must fail to support revocation of the certificate even though the act is labeled ‘criminal’ on the books.

Torbriner’s words rung loudly in the California Legislature, which decriminalized consensual sex between consenting adults. The Legislature should do the same with prostitution.

But that won’t happen soon. So teachers who engage in illegal conduct, whether it is prostitution, or lewd conduct in public places, or consensual sex with minors run the risk of going to jail and being forced to register as sex offenders. And, yes, they also risk losing the privilege of teaching our kids.