tangents

news & views

by dal mcintire

Sept. 4-London-After a 3-year study of homosexuality and prostitution, the British government committee on "vice" today recommended easing the law on homosexuality. Having heard opinions of clergy, judges and doctors, the committee of 12 men and 3 women urged that homosexual acts in private between consenting adults no longer be a criminal offense.

"We do not think it is proper for the law to concern itself with what a man does in private unless it can be shown to be so contrary to the public good that the law ought to intervene in its function as guardian of the public good."

The group headed by Sir John Wolfenden, Vice-chancellor of Reading University, made its recommendations to Home Secretary R. A. Butler. It is expected that suitable legislation will be submitted in Parliament. The committee was appointed by former Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe after the widely publicized arrests of Sir John Gielgud, Lord Montagu, Peter Wildeblood, Rupert Croft-Cooke and others on homosexual charges (see ONE, May 1954 et seq.) The report denied the popular notion that homosexuality leads historically to demoralization and decay of civilizations. Better sex education was suggested as a possible

means of lowering the incidence of homosexuality.

This brings to a climax, if not quite to an end, a struggle that dates from 1885 when Henry Labouchere attached a rider to a bill on white slavery, for the first time. making homosexual acts committed in private a criminal offense.

CONFIDENTIAL

As this is written, the CONFIDENTIAL trial is still making headlines, with the papers hoping for scandals even juicier than those printed by the smut-and-slander mags. The gutter mags made a profitable thing of hinting at nasty affairs they couldn't quite describe. The more "respectable" dailies have now made a bigger sensation out of the image of hundreds of film stars quaking in fear that the court might elicit confessions even spicier than the misdeeds alleged in CONFIDENTIAL.

We've never liked the peepingTom filth and fake puritanism of CONFIDENTIAL and its ilk. But the cure, we fear, may prove worse than the disease. Freedom of the press is firmly grounded on the right of even that which is repugnant to the majority to be published. Procedure in this trial has been highly irregular, and much as we sympathize with those who