Question of Consent

At the poor man's pub and the rich man's dinner table, the most hotly debated subject in Britain for weeks past has been homosexuality. The question: Should homosexual acts between consenting adults be taken off the list of statutory crimes in Britain? Last September a special governmental committee headed by Sir John Wolfenden declared that they should. So did many medical men and most of the intelligentsia. Last week, before galleries crowded with spectators (most of them women), Britain's House of Lords gravely debated the Wolfenden recommendations. "Many hesitate," said Labor's Roman Catholic Lord Pakenham, "lest an act of legal toleration be mistaken for one of moral approval, [but] when we reflect on what torture is being suffered by many decent citizens--along with others less respectable, of course--I hope that we remember the injunction, 'Blessed are the merciful.' Let us take advantage of a point in time while it is still in our power to do the civilized thing."

Crime v. Sin. With the spiritual might of the Established Church behind him, the Archbishop of Canterbury gave Pakenham's view his unqualified support. Britain's Primate had earlier drawn a clear distinction between "crime" as a concern of the law--and "sin" as the concern of the Church. Law, he said, should still be invoked to protect and control those under 21 and "to protect the unwilling over that age," but the sin of homosexuality by consenting adults in private "should not come within the ambit of the law."

"There are, I believe," said the archbishop, "groups of clubs of homosexuals with an organization of their own, with a language of their own, and a kind of freemasonry from which it is not at all easy to escape. So long as homosexual offenses between consenting adults are criminal and punishable by law, the pressure of this kind of freemasonry will remain and will operate powerfully, for it gains strength from the fact that it must remain a secret society to avoid the law. Into this kind of nightmare world--for it is a nightmare world--there can be no entrance for the forces of righteousness until . . . they are delivered from the fears, the glamour and even the crusading spirit of the rebel against law and convention who claims to be a martyr by persecution."

Indulgence v. Martyrdom. Not all churchmen were of the archbishop's mind. "There is no more baneful or contagious an influence in the world," said the Lord Bishop of Rochester, "than that which emanates from homosexual practice. There are such things as sodomy clubs. There was one in Oxford between the wars and another in Cambridge, which shamelessly sported a tie, [but] I cannot believe with the most reverend Primate that the best way of getting rid of these clubs is to indulge them."

But the decisive words came from the government's official spokesman, dour, waxen-faced Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor. "The government do not think that the general sense of the community is with the committee in its recommendation, and therefore they think the problem requires further study." In other words, unless public opinion changed, the government was going to keep homosexuality on the criminal list.

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