Being unable to attend this year's Institute Institute I have been dependent upon those notos which have been reported by ONE Magazine from time to time. It is possible that in missing your reports (THE LADDER, March, 1961, and subsequent issues) our impressions of your opposition do great disservice to your efforts. But hear me out, and if I do no more than reiterate what you have stated I shall most humbly apologize.

The reason I suspect that your stated opposition contented itself with things less than a coming to grips with the primal errorthat of a Bill of Rights specifically favoring ANY minorityis because ONE Magazine's defense seems to have taken shape on deviational levels far from the basic postulates of the conflict. In effect, their rebuttal is one of taunting. "Wassamatta?" they hoot, "after so many years of open publication and yearly open conventions are we to believe that homophiles are afraid to stand up for their rights?" This particular herring, I believe, is in counter to your negative assertion that a statagem such as the Minority Bill of Rights in itself (let alone its projection) would sot the homophile movement back many years. I contend that being afraid to stand up for our rights', equally with the fear of "set back", are definitely not the issuo in any way, shape or form.

The issue is, in a nutshell, that a Bill of Rights specifically drawn up for any minority (whether political, racial or social) is wholly undemocratic and thus wholly UN AMERICAN. Civil rights, or more correctly in constitutional terms, CIVIL PRIVILEGES in a Republic engendered upon and devoted to the preservation and constant extension of the democratic processes, are, and must ever BE, INDIVISIBLE. Civil privileges, being both a collective responsibility as well as the individual's benefice, devolve upon the ALL the obligation to apply them to each alike, without reservation, or to none!

Two of ONE Institute's presumed "rights" come to mind vividly exposed in this context: (1) The right of homophiles not to have to pay oducational taxes to care for the excessive inseminations of heterophiles; and, the right of homophiles to establish homophile neighborhood concentrations and live in them if they so choose.

(2),

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