Who's Got the Microscope?

lyn pedersen

A Tentative Enquiry into What we Know and What we Think we Know, and What we might propose to Do about it.

What is this thing we're talking about? Is homosexuality some fetid growth, calling for a surefire extermination technique, or is it perhaps a natural phenomenon society must learn somehow to live with?

Cunningly phrased questions can almost foreordain their answers. Doctors, lawyers and police chiefs, along with Wisconsin Senators, give one pat and monotonous answer-"Wipe it out."

But how? Moral resolve, castration, hormone pills, imprisonment, parental guidance, or psychoanalysis-not to mention astrology, dianetics and more obvious forms of witchcraft . . . each authority with his own pet and perfect solution. In private, they're more likely to admit they really don't know what to do about it, since they don't know what causes it, or even what it really is.

The homosexual is likely to jump to the opposite conclusion, on the gratuitous assumption that truth can be found by merely turning nonsense upside down. Society must accept the homosexual, they insist.

Whether society must or can exterminate or adopt the homosexual, or do something quite different, rests on the question of what homosexuality really is. Prescription ought to follow diagnosis.

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Society involves individual and group relationships, bound together and ripped apart by laws, prerogatives, principles, ideals and all sorts of contrary notions. It assumes a pact between individual and general polity in which guarantees are interchanged.

Society is a mode of accomplishing ends beyond the reach of the individual, or molding the individual himself in more complex patterns. Yet the individual needs to assert his special identity against society. And because the general polity is split crisscross by the jostling of various sects and section for power, we have conflict of law which here says "do" and there says "don't."

The individual drifts and bumbles, his mind an unreconstructed mishmash of quips and quivers, a Biblical injunction alongside a maximum from Poor Richard, and perhaps a dash of florid nonsense from some Chamber-of-Commerce news release.

Any particular social situation involves some degree of compromise between two principles-Utility and Liberty. Utility gets the work done. Liberty plugs the leaks, corrects injustices, adds innovation and variety.

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