WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

The following excerpts are from an address presented before the Executive Council of the Mattachine Foundation. It is an unusually clear-eyed and searching study. Calmly objective, it asks questions which subdue the blithely enthusiastic and elate the dubious. To be noted, is its sharp contrast in ideology to the David Freeman article, "The Homosexual Culture" which follows in this issue.

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I would like to call to your attention that the minority here dealt with is in no way a peculiar group so far as national, state or city sex laws are concerned. As the authors of a recent book (Your Marriage and The Law Pilpel and Zavin Rinehart Pub.) have stated in the Chapter, "Sex and the Criminal Law," that, "The chances are nine out of ten that you are a sex criminal." This statement applies to the general public, not to any particular group. It is good to remember at all times that sex laws in general are a compound of necessary prohibitions on the one hand and restrictive laws which no longer represent our contemporary sense of moral and social values on the other, and rest on a set of unspoken major premises which underline both sets of laws. (Refer to above mentioned book.)

In most states, it is a crime for any unmarried persons to have sexual intercourse; such acts would come under one or the other headings of three distinct "crimes": fornication, seduction and prostitution. If the parties are married, the additional crime of adultery would be brought in. In some states if both parties are married, but not to each other. the charges of bigamy can be lodged. The framers of these laws, not wishing to miss anything, have what are called "catch-all" statutes under the headings of Vagrancy, Loitering, Disorderly Conduct, Indecent Exposure, Committing a Nuisance, Lewd Behavior, Lascivious Acts, and similar statutes which can be and are invoked to punish practically any sex outside the marriage bed.

But our puritanical law makers were not satisfied with this. Even certain types of acts performed in the marriage bed are illegal in many states and, if one party wishes to accuse the other for violating such an ordinance, the party accused can be tried. Artificial insemination has been hauled into the courts on the grounds of adultery, insofar as the wife has conceived artificially, and the court decided that even though the wife had so conceived (if she had been telling the truth) she would be nevertheless guilty of adultery. This has made many doctors quite unwilling to perform the functions of artificial insemination until they know what the laws of each state are pertaining to such a subject. Of course, the use of contraceptives in many states is still taboo.