EDITORIAL

What do you believe?

At ONE we believe that the homosexual in our present society occupies the position of a second-class citizen; that many of the rights and freedoms vouchsafed the heterosexual are daily being denied to the homosexual.

To study ways of safeguarding individual liberty from such tyranny of the majority "A Homosexual Bill of Rights" was programmed as the theme for ONE's 1961 Midwinter Institute. From the Institute sessions there seem to have emerged two quite opposite viewpoints.

The first of these is nicely expressed in the words of John Stuart Mill: "The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is protection. . . . The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, obsolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."

Opposing this is the belief of a large number of homosexuals that the lot of the homosexual is not so bad after all; that ONE is being alarmist in its position and that its efforts are self-created troublemaking.

The attitude reflected by this opposite viewpoint seems to be best expressed by Edmund Bergler: "Every homosexual is an exquisite injustice collector, and consequently a psyhic masochist. The psychic masochist is a neurotic who constantly creates, by means of his own unconscious provocations, situations in which he finds himself 'behind the eight-ball.' What he is really after, although consciously he is ig norant of this dreary fact, is defeat, humiliation, rejection. With predictable regularity, this drama is enacted."

What do you believe?

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The Editors

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