Sir: The interview by Father Peter Storey with Lord Soper
was encouraging, informative and helpful. I am proud to claim that Lord Soper is a coVice President (non-executive) of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality with myself. I hope that that organisation will ask your permission to reprint this article so that all its members may read it. As, like myself, Peter Storey is a Catholic, I would find it intriguing if you were to invite Lord Soper to interview him in return. I suspect he might find himself on the mat before the Cardinal as a result.
With great respect I would take up Lord Soper on the question of normality. There is, I submit, no precise definition of normality. It is a majority view of behaviour held in any one community at any one time. Normality is, in effect, what society chooses to make it: and society can be wrong for a number of reasons.
Whilst I fully appreciate that in Lord Soper's view, as an ex-President of the Methodist Church, the homosexual act, being undreative, is to be deplored it is open to question in a world suffering from over-population whether this is necessarily so. It is possible to have love and affection without creation and to be creative without sexual reproduction. At least that is my experience.
Lord Soper states: " I should have thought that we shall have a right to expect a more responsible attitude from homosexuals when we treat them better." I endorse that view in principle although in practice all homosexuals are not covered by this allusion. The great majority are wholly responsible. The task ahead is a two-way process but the heterosexual majority, because they are the majority, must bear the major burden for carrying it out.
Lord Soper has some things to say about cure and therapy. Here he is on dangerous ground. He is making a generalisation about all homosexuals whereas it is only sensible to accept that it should be a proposition which relates to some homosexuals in particular.
Finally I hope that Lord Soper's suggestion that Methodist Parsons should meet and talk with homosexual groups, which are established throughout the country, will be taken up by them. They will be very welcome and their views will be listened to with attention. It is also possible that they will learn something to their own advantage, to that of the homosexuals and of society as a whole.
Ian Harvey 43A Lonsdale Road, London, WI I.
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