Homosexual Law Reform [1]

Sir: Reading your columns (not this time with an eye to the Vietnam conflict) I confess I am defeated by the impenetrable minds of those who do not object to our bitter laws enacted against practising adult homosexuals. Not saddled (through no merit of my own) with a homosexual temperament, I accept the Catholic teaching that only lifelong heterosexual monogamy is morally lawful; and if deliberately infertile, the union would be unnatural and unlawful. We are told that homosexuality is socially disruptive. It could be, in some circumstances; but surely never as much as adultery or divorce, which rupture the family structure. We are told it is unnatural. Yes; but in what sense? Surely most of all in its inevitable infertility (subjectively the act seems natural to the homosexual) – and are our modern marriages, dominated by the chemist and the psychiatrist, in which nearly all acts are deliberately infertile, so strikingly natural?

We are told it is immoral. I agree – no less and no more immoral than fornication, since sexual morality depends on the sexual temperament of the person concerned – if I am tempted to a heterosexual act, and succumb, would I be less or more at fault than a homosexual who succumbed to a parallel temptation? A little more, I think, since I could licitly choose between married life or celibacy; whereas he would be morally entitled to celibacy alone, which is a hard and lonely choice.

‘Ah yes, but Mr Baxter, you know there’s a difference!’ Indeed I do. The difference always resides in love. And I have seen homosexual couples whose passionate and devoted love was – I shall not say, equal to that of any husband and wife – but equal to that of any man and his faithful mistress. I recognise a mystery when I see one. Is this to condone the practice of homosexuality? Not exactly. It is rather to say: Love and let love. Once I presumptuously asked a man in jail why he was there. He was a homosexual, and he answered page 264 in seven words – ‘I am here because I was lonely.’ I think he was speaking the exact truth.

1967 (421)