To send a homosexual to prison is, in the words of Dr Stanley Jones, ‘as futile from the point of view of treatment as to hope to rehabilitate an alcoholic by giving him occupational therapy in a brewery’.
The answer to the first question is a matter of belief obscured by emotion, rather than a rational decision made upon unequivocal evidence. It will be clear by now that I do not believe homosexuality to be either a sin or a pathology. But many people do and, true to their belief, contend that homosexuals must be treated. Even if ‘cure’ – that is, a turn to a heterosexual erotic attachment – is uncertain, they believe that the treatment may help those tortured by neurotic reactions of guilt, depression, and anxiety, or at least may make the man a better-adjusted homosexual. With this latter view there can be no argument, although it seems that a homosexual’s maladjustment is as much due to societal attitudes to homosexuality as to his own psychological disturbance.
*311/16/1*
