Dear Miss Hunter:

Do you know, or have you heard of many cases of marriages between two women? Are there many divorces in such cases and, if so, what are the reasons usually? I think. radio and television programs about female and male homosexuals are a good idea, so as to educate the public about homosexuals. I noticed a news item in ONE Confidential about the staff member who made such a radio broadcast.

Miss S.

Sioux City, Iowa

MORALITY AND THE HOMOSEXUAL

Dear ONES:

I am sending you this book (Morality and the Homosexual, by Rev. Michael J. Buckley) in the hope that you may want to review it. (See p. 19). I was led to buy it out of a curiosity aroused in part by the articles and letters which have appeared in ONE during the past few years indicating a marked increase of material about religion and the homosexual.

Most of this material comes from people who are almost desperately anxious to assert a legitimate place for the homosexual in the Christian system. As might be expected, they make out a pretty fair case for themselves.

One must of course sympathize with their desire to find acceptance among the churches, but I must confess that many of their statements and what they relate of their experience leave me with uncomfortable feelings of doubt. I ask myself: Has the Latin Church at long last really found a place for the homosexual? Have the other Christian churches?

A very little examination of the enclosed book will show that the Latin church has not swerved from its condemnation by one iota. Homosexuality is considered by them grossly unnatural and peculiarly subject to God's displeasure. This, then, is the Catholic view, so far as anything not directly promulgated by the Vatican, represents the official viewpoint.

I suspect that, perhaps less rigorously put, this would be the view of all Christian churches, East and West, were they to attempt to formulate what they really believe, and are bound to believe in accordance with the Christian moral tradition.

No doubt that individual homosexuals meet with increasing sympathy from individual clergymen in various churches. If such response allows homosexuals to feel at home in one or another congregation or parish, I should be the last to deny them what satisfaction they find. But I do fear that, funda-

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mentally, they are living in a fool's paradise; that they are assuming membership in a family in which they do not even have black sheep standing.

Dear Sir:

Mr. S.

Ohio

In the announcement of the Buckley book the curious word compassionate is used. Don't kid yourselves. Take it from one who was brought up in it, who has heard the dialectic and knows this type of mind, when it comes to the homosexual the Roman Catholic church knows that there are more subtle ways to kill the human mind and spirit than by poison or ax. In the parochial schools is learned the label "degenerate" to be applied to homosexuals and the fundamental (for them) proposition that sexuality shall not exist, a tight-lipped conspiracy of silence.

Dear ONE:

Mr. H.

Brooklyn, New York

Christianity concerns itself with the supernatural, as against the natural. In elucidating what is right, what is good, what is bad, it is not for us to say, but for our Creator to tell us. The words queer, prostitute, the sex-element, divorce, the flesh-these aren't the standards Roman Catholicism uses as a gauge to ferret out who is and who is not worthy. It's what is right, what is wrong, from God's point of view, that's final. What Christ concerned himself with was called by himself Sin. Pius XII said to an audience of Italian lawyers, "The crime of our day is that Sin is no longer recognized, nor looked upon as Sin."

One has but to peruse through Butler's twelve volumes of The Lives of the Saints to read about lesbians living in brotherhood religious orders and youths who lived as nuns. Morally, of course, these lived by the sacred rule, dying, as we say, in the odor of sanctity.

Most priests in the Confessional don't comment on how you perform your sex acts. When you run up against one who does you have the privilege of continuing to search for one who doesn't. When a man is ordained a priest it does not make him less human, nor free him of carnality.

To those people who believe the Catholic Church "too strict," as one born and raised, I say to them in the one word of Eva Marie Saint-

-!

Mr. L.

San Francisco, California

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