M

ARE YOU NOW

OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN A HOMOSEXUAL?

The following report, made to the Mattachine Foundation, was approved and adopted April 1953:

PROPOSALS FOR AMENDMENTS TO THE MATTACHINE FOUNDATION BY-LAWS: concerning public statements and attitudes on partisan issues, and concerning security responsibilities of Foundation members to their supporters in the Community at large.

One of the Foundation's recent mail inquiries said, in part, "if you can prove that you are 100% pro-American, and 100% anti-Communist, please send me, etc...." Here precisely is the horn of our dilemma. As Harry Bridges, whose perjury conviction appeal was recently accepted for review by the Supreme Court, said in regard to his accusers, "How do you prove that you are not what you are not?" How, indeed! How do I prove my good faith to someone who wants to believe me a fraud? How do you prove you're a God-fearing soul to a group who declare that you consort with the devil? It was exactly that impossibility of disproving intangible accusations, in the fact of "a priori" dictums, decisions made prior to a hearing or trial, which led our American forefathers to outlaw once and for all . . . the hated inquisition's pattern of assuming a man guilty until he proved himself innocent. Our forefathers reversed the principle, by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, thus initiating the principle that a man was innocent until proven guilty by others beyond the shadow of a doubt.

"If we can PROVE we are 100% anti-Communist . . ." What does this mean? If we are to believe the divergent editorial generalities of such papers

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