go out and fight the thing and protect his own good name. It is not morally right for you to to court and plead go guilty to something you didn't do. No one would think of pleading guilty to burglary or robbery, yet they do go in and plead guilty to 650 and onehalf or 647 Subsection A.
We are all acquainted with a minority of persons who are homosexual or, maybe, bisexual who persist in activity that is so immoral and so flagrantly abusive to the good taste of most people that they generally cast discredit on all others. The greatest blow for good that an organization like ONE can make is to educate this minority within a minority to a more wholesome and orderly approach to life. In the courts I see the same old faces again and again, and when I look at the police reports I notice that they are the same persons who have been arrested for the same offense. Now this is nonsense. You might get burned once, but not twice in the same place. Perhaps such individuals are seeking to punish themselves. Perhaps they are incredibly stupid. But most of them are not. They do, however, need professional helpnot to change their homosexual tendencies but to keep them from again and again placing themselves in jeopardy. When a person who is a repeated offender comes into my office, he is the man I try to send to a psychiatrist, not the man who is a happy, practicing homosexual.
I would not care to have someone tell me to change my sex life. In fact, I would not permit it. It is nobody's business what the next person's private life is like. If any of us becomes a public nuisance in this direction, however, we make trouble for everybody. The man who openly solicits in the streets and outrages public decency is the kind we ought to helpand this is something, I believe, ONE is trying to do.
But in spite of all the education in
one
the world there will still be genuine abuses and some unlawful arrests from time to time. And when a person finds himself so persecuted, because there is a drive on by vice officers, or for some other reason, that person has two very good moves he can make: one is a suit directed against the city, and the other is a suit filed under the Civil Rights Act. And when a person is abused it is really his duty to take one or both of these remedies. By so doing, he will not only help protect himself but all other persons who may come along after him.
An important thing that must be attempted by organizations such as ONE is to get persons of authority on sexual and related matters and those who understand the problems to push for a law change. Certainly we will never in the world get the legislators to take the obnoxious sections out of the Penal Code because these men are even afraid to talk too much about the subject. The only way is to get a new Penal Code, like Illinois, and simply not put the undesirable sections in.
The original founders of our code system here in California had a splendid idea. They wanted all of our laws to expire either every 10 or 20 years, and those that were not specifically reenacted would thus die on the books. I think it was a good idea and one that we might consider re-introducing -not only in the field of criminal law. Every state has such a mass of laws that it is extremely difficult for an individual to know his legal rights or where he stands before the law.
But since we can't change the law today, we must live with it, and we must recognize what our rights are and also what our duties are to society. A right is not an open license. No. We have freedom of speech, but we cannot scream "fire" in a crowded theatre. But we do have the right, I should think to behave sexually as we please in our own bedrooms and be-
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