EDITORIAL

Freedom is a popular cause today. At least in limited areas, so many Americans have flocked to its defense since McCarthy fizzled that the attainment of full civil liberties for Negroes at least seems assured. But it takes a 'touchy' subject like homosexuality to separate the honest freedom fighters from those liberal poseurs who merely follow popular intellectual currents.

When the rights of a racial minority are infringed nowadays, champions of freedom and civil rights seems happily plentiful. But we often wonder why it gets so lonely on the civil liberties front when homosexuality is at issue.

Why do those who espouse freedom for all minorities, the right to be some single 'right', can narrowly forget that freedom is a many-sided thing. But such narrowness ill becomes those supposedly concerned with general rights and freedom. Yet homosexual victims of persecution and discrimination are left wondering, "Where did all the civil liberties people go?"

Why do those who espouse freedom for all minorities, the rights to be different and the right to make one's own moral judgements in the face of strong public disapproval, so often forget their high principles at the very mention of homosexuality, and turn their heads when homosexuals are blackmailed, forced to resign from jobs, slandered or illegally arrested? And the best of civil liberties groups, though they will occasionally act on a particularly nasty mass arrest of homosexuals, still refuse to admit (as they do for other minorities) that there is any civil rights question involved in the general treatment of homosexuals in America.

Are these people simply dishonest in their professed devotion to the rights of all individuals, each in his own way, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Or is it that they are brave, but not very bravenot brave enough to run any risk of being tarred with this brush themselves?

Yet when American communists were at the stake, most liberals realized that even despite the problems of foreign subversion, their own freedoms were unsafe if an unpopular group could be persecuted with impunity. This is true of homosexuals as well. Heterosexuals who deviate in any sense from supposedly normal sex standards can be prosecuted under most anti-homosexual laws, and they cannot successfully defend their rights to sexual freedom unless they also defend the homosexual's right peaceably to seek happiness according to his own nature. When society begins to legislate sex codes, the inevitable tendency is to gradually suppress all dissenters.

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