know you don't read the rules, officer?" asked the magistrate. The officer answered, "We interpret the rules in our own way"!! With this Mr. Murphy ruled, "Not Guilty."

No other verdict was possible, yet the lengthy defense was so terribly costly that at more than one point it had seemed impossible to continue ...In Auckland and New Plymouth, New Zealand, however, the news of the day shows the tendency is to take a more rational view of the subject in some quarters. In a number of recent cases of homosexuality before the New Zealand Courts, magistrates have merely imposed fines. Frequently in previous cases, prison sentences were meted out.

As a forerunner to this in Auckland on June 11th The Methodist Conference decided to submit to the Government a report which favored the legal toleration of homosexual acts between consenting adults as a first step towards a positive solution of the problem.

The conference also asked the Government to facilitate continued investigation into causes of homosexuality using resources of Govt. Depts. and subsidizing educational, medical, and psychiatric research.

"To say that in certain circumstances homosexual behavior should not be a criminal offence is not to condone or encourage private immorality," says the report. The report brings out that there are certain anomalies in the present law regarding homosexual offenses. It takes very little account of female homosexuality.

"There is no reason why the law should punish a man for what a woman may do with impunity.

"Further, it is clearly inequitable and contrary to the common good that homosexual acts should be severely punished while the adulterer and adulteress and those respon-

one

sible for bringing unwanted children into the world stand outside the sanctions of the law.

"How far such punishment stamps out the crime is debatable. Most authorities today agree that it is futile to send a homosexual to prison.

"It would seem also that to deal with the problem by legal suppression is to deal with the symptoms while neglecting the disease which produced them.

"The fear that a change in the law would 'open the flood gates' and bring unbridled license is an exaggerated one.

"It is not known how many are deterred by the present law. It is known that many are not," is the report's astute conclusion.... Meanwhile in the first case of its kind ever heard in a Montreal court, two young girls were charged with committing an act of gross indecency with each other! Never before had two females been charged with such an offense. When brought before the Canadian court, Juliette Moreau, 21, and Louise Chalifoux, also 21, vigorously denied the charge. Their protests were in vain, however, because of eye-witness accounts by arresting dets.

Apparently unable to make a charge of possessing stolen goods stick, the pair of cops searched for something else to use against the girls. On the witness stand one of the dets. testified that he and his partner had taken up an observation post of the "lesbian lair" from the window of a next door house. Both officers described in detail "the act of perversion." After seeing the action, the two raided the girls' room. Both girls were found guilty: Louise was fined $50 for her part, while Juliette was jailed for 30 days. She had been the active partner.