"But does that make it right?" our critic asks. "Just because some

monkeys and dogs and chickens occasionally...

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But that is another question, though it clears the air. Our critic has abandoned his unnatural line and is now talking only about local human notions of right and wrong. We'll have to find what he bases his ideas onand possibly we'll find him retreating again as soon as we get down to cases.

But perhaps he isn't ready fully to abondon the appeal to Nature. "Isn't reproduction the natural function of sex?" he asks. "Homosexuality is functionally unnatural."

Where does that get us? As far as the species is concerned, sex sometimes results in progeny, and was probably invented for the purpose. But do individuals necessarily copulate to have offspring? Isn't it true that in most cases, they copulate for pleasure or release, with offspring as an accidental byproduct? (Some primitive humans, and most animals no doubt, don't even know there's a connection.) Really, how often do people ever say, "Let's go in the other room and make a baby?" Even the Church of Rome approves the pleasure principle tacitly by allowing the "rhythm method" (sex while the woman is safe).

This is only half the answer. Sex is a very complicated matter as Freudians say. Nature frequently produces curious by-products, and throughout Nature, sexual energies are commonly diverted to non-procreative uses. So if we can discover that homosexuals are sometimes useful to society, we needn't be unduly apologetic about the waste of a certain amount of sperm or ova. Nature produces both in fantastic abundance and most of it goes to waste under the best of conditions.

Our critic is persistent: "But homosexuality uses the organs for purposes

they weren't designed for." Well, we haven't seen the blueprints, but putting things to new uses is only human. Everything civilized about man is functionally unnatural. Education is a process of reshaping or distorting the "natural clay." We weren't designed to fly. Our hands weren't designed for typewriters or paint brushes. Who worries? We buried Rousseau's "Noble Savage" a generation It is man's nature to ago. change his nature. It is natural for man to be unnatural.

Our critic may interject at this point that homosexuality attempts to foil the universal law of Nature that opposites attract and likes repel. This may be a universal law of electromagnetism, but it is far from being true in Biology. If it were so we would expect to find lions trying to mate with mice. It is almost always erroneous to take a law derived from one science and arbitrarily try to superimpose it on another science. In many species, male and female are so alike that a male in rut apparently can't tell another male from a female except by smell. Many recent psychological studies have shown that among humans at least, like attracts like in the great majority of cases. And again, a reference to those Copromonas where sexual congress takes place between sexually undifferentiated identical twins.

"But," our critic comes back, on a different tack, "Heterosexuality is wholesome and beautiful, while homosexuality is degenerate, sickly and vulgar."

Another old argument. But, pray tell, what was degenerate or vulgar about Johnathan's love for David, described in the Bible as "surpassing the love of woman." If perhaps the proportion of degeneracy among homosexuals in our present society seems high, it is because society forces most homosexuals into that role. The