THE SPECTATOR
DECENT AND INDECENT
The Government's anti-Aids campaign is falsely based. As Auberon Waugh pointed out in his column last week and Mr Norman Fowler now admits, existing figures show that the disease afflicts homosexuals and drug abusers almost alone. There is a heterosexual risk, but infinitesimally small compared with the homosexual one. And so the current cam- paigns present a characteristically modern mixture of prudery and bluntness. They are painfully explicit about physical detail, evasive to the point of dishonesty about who is most likely to get the disease. People have detected the flaw in the campaigns; no doubt that is the reason why so many have told opinion polls that they will not change their habits as a result of them. A dangerous split is developing between the public at large and the voice of officialdom. Officialdom, even those charged with the supposedly neutral task of providing health information, avoids emphasising the close connection between Aids and homosexuality. Public opinion does not doubt the connection. As with immigration in the 1960s, the politicians say one thing and the people reckon that they know different. This split will produce ignorance, fear and hatred. The persecu- tion of homosexuals has already begun. The popular Sunday newspapers are now available for any 'rent-boy' who wants to sell stories about his famous clients. Be- cause of ludicrously exaggerated fears ab- out the ease of infection, many are fright- ened to associate with homosexuals. Homosexuals will find it harder to get jobs. It is said that it is becoming almost impossi- ble for bachelors to be made Conservative candidates.
In these circumstances, the plight of homosexuals is actually made worse by the official position that there is nothing, morally, to choose between homo- and heterosexuality. It is one thing to say, as did the reformers in the 1960s, that it is odious for the law to punish homosexual acts between consenting adults in private, and another to claim that homosexuality is `valid' or even admirable.
The British tolerance of private tastes is quite different from the more modern and more American emphasis on sexual `rights'. That tolerance is eroded by poli- cies designed to promote homosexuality in schools and by political campaigns which glorify the homosexual 'lifestyle'. Toler- ance can only exist if disgust is kept at bay. Flaunting breeds disgust. Flaunting a habit which spreads a fatal disease will breed rage. This is why Aids, although a medical, not a moral issue, has raised such delicate moral questions. By making homosexuality more prominent, the disease has made people examine, and sometimes change, their sexual attitudes. For many, the dis- covery of what went on in the bath-houses of New York and San Francisco, even, surprisingly often, the discovery for the first time of what it is that homosexuals actually do, has brought out a latent distaste. Exponents of post-Sixties sexual morality would dismiss such distaste as mere prejudice. They would defend any sexual habit which was indulged with the consent of both parties.
Such an argument should be resisted. Man's morality does not simply consist in not harming others: it depends on his acting in a way which befits his humanity. The belief that some sexual acts are per- verted accords with the emphasis — essen- tial in a civilised society — on the dignity of man. Acts which stray from those for which the human body is designed and which defy the chief purpose of sexual intercourse impair that dignity. When St Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, criti- cises those 'leaving the natural use of the woman, . . . men with men working that which is unseemly . . .' he is not upholding some obscure cultural taboo. His is the moral conclusion of human experience. Some relationships express the natural fulfilment of human potential and give the human race a better idea of itself; others do not. A mother and child, for example, represent creative love in a way that a pair of homosexuals never could. Homosexual- ity is morally and now, with Aids, often literally, a dead end.
If homosexual acts, however, are be- neath human dignity, so are legal, let alone mob attacks on homosexuals. The law's intervention in private, adult sexuality is almost always brutal and crass. Aids does not make the average homosexual a danger to the general public and so cannot justify the law's intrusion into his life. What is needed is a repudiation of homosexuality but decency towards homosexuals. What we seem to be getting is the reverse.
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