"Not all homosexual persons need, or are amenable to, medical treatment. Many respond to kindly and sympathetic help from friends or those in authority over them. Some adjust as a result of spiritual experience. A large proportion can benefit, to a greater or less degree, by medical treatment, though some confirmed homosexuals seem to be beyond psychiatric help in our present state of knowledge. The Committee estimates that a definitely valuable and significant improvement, in the sense of successful personal and social adjustment, takes place in a number of patients, though it must be admitted that completely successful treatment is rare with essential homosexuals.

"The limitations of medical treatment should be borne in mind by the courts. It is sometimes wrongly assumed that an offender who is not susceptible to corrective treatment must necessarily be especially vicious and deserving of severe punishment."

This has been said before by individuals, but never before has a major American or English professional association denied the possibility (by known methods) of curing most homosexuals. Most ministers, judges, analysts, etc., still talk loosely of cure, cure, when there is no cure. (To say homosexuals can't generally now be cured is not the same as saying none of them need any sort of therapy.) But most of the "cure" talk is nonsense, based on limited success with a small proportion of borderline homosexuals. These four paragraphs might be the most important thing to come out of the entire recent mess in England.

The report also notes that most conclusions regarding homosexuality are derived from limited and unrepresentative groups (patients and prisoners) and the conclusions therefore are generally unreliable.

One weakness vitiates both this study and that by the Moral Welfare Council: These men are apparently unable to see beyond the official moral pronouncements of their own culture, a process sociologists and anthropologists think necessary to evaluate any social problem. To re-examine a major social condition, one must go beneath the surface of prejudice and practice to re-examine the basic moral assumptions for their utility, their justice, their sense. Among the assumptions in this category that neither doctors nor clergymen bother to re-examine is the notion that the expenditure of sexual energies is justified solely for procreation.

(Would the clergymen who reason so tightly on this "head of a pin" agree that the seed of all fruit and grain-and chickens-was divinely produced for procreation, therefore being sinful to eat? The logic is identical. Nature is more than lavish in her generative prowess. The seed that may seem basically designed for one sole purpose is often necessarily used for another. Man himself produces an almost limitless supply of seed, and the theological assumption that it is sinful to waste it is simply nonsense. Most of it naturally goes to waste. Only if a man spent most of his time at impregnations could he perhaps avoid wasting most of the seed within him. If there is a plan in nature, the wasting of seed must logically be part of that plan. In a monogamous society few men will wish to instigate the generative process much more often than once a year. Not even the clergy would be so rash as to urge that married couples should only cohabit when they intend to produce children. Yet the chief moral objection to homosexual acts remains that they allegedly divert sexual energies from their supposedly exclusive natural purpose of generation. The doctors incidentally point out that the incidence of homosexuality is hardly high enough to particularly affect the general birth rate.)

Doctors and clergymen both admit that homosexual components in the individual may be just as natural as heterosexual. They both admit that the homosexual is not responsible for a condition he can seldom change. They may even suggest, as the clergymen do, that homosexuality is less sinful than adultery,

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