A SUBJECT FOR THOUGHT
SIR,—The Spectator can always be trusted to give humanitarian causes the help of its columns. Mr. Ackerley's letter on the journalistic silence about recent homo-sexual prosecutions demands support. Our criminal laws concerning homo-sexual offences are a hundred years behind informed public opinion and are brutal in their ferocity. In this country we do not purport, generally speaking, to punish immorality per se but only when proved to be injurious to the community. Many forms of immorality, revolting to most of us, are not punishable as they are presumed to be done at the risk of the doer only. Is it suggested that constant promiscuity in normal sex relations, with its venereal threat, is a less evil to the community than homo-sexuality? The unnatural vices repel us more. But is that a reason for awarding no punishment in one case and ten years' penal servitude in the other? Not moral disapproval but scientific knowledge should be the basis of our criminal law. What does scientific, medical and psychological opinion says as to the injury to the community and to the parties arising from these two offences? Is it not the fact that youthful offenders, if the law has not intervened, generally reform and become quite normal husbands and fathers? The guilt seems to lie not so much in the vice as in the seduction of the young by the old which is by no means always a feature of these cases. Then let the punishment be severe but not barbarous. One of the tragic memories of my youth is to recall an Assize trial at which an illiterate agricultural labourer, to all appearance a moron, incapable of saying a word in his defence, received a three years' sentence for a single homo- sexual act. An act to which I thought then and now he was incapable of applying any moral judgement.—Yours, &C., ATHELSTAN RENDALL.
Branksome Park, Bournemouth.
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