SPECTATOR
The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL Telephone: 020-7405 1706; Fax 020-7242 0603
SEX OFFENSIVE
The British have rarely been completely at ease with sex, and still cannot quite make up their minds whether they want their country to be Sodom and Gomorrah or Calvin's Geneva. Mr Straw, the Home Sec- retary, appears to want it to partake of a lit- tle of both, though any such combination is likely to be highly unstable and even com- bustible. He wants to be prissy yet broad- minded, tolerant yet repressive. He is a symptom of the confusion of our times.
His Home Office has set up a Sex Offences Review, which proposes, among other changes, the legalisation of certain kinds of homosexual behaviour in public and the outlawry of necrophilia. Here we see a typical instance of the government's good- cop, bad-cop approach to social affairs: on the one hand permissive and on the other hand sternly moralistic. Of course, the two proposed measures are not of equal social significance. Necrophilia, while extremely distasteful to most people, hardly obtrudes daily upon their consciousness; while open homosexu- al conduct, if permitted, almost certainly will. And militant homosexuals will see to it that it does.
Offences against public decorum have always been extremely difficult to prosecute, and the maintenance of such decorum depends at least as much on social custom as on legal enforcement. But that is no reason to let yet one more genie out of one more bottle, a genie that will never return once released. For once indecorous behaviour becomes the legally sanctioned social cus- tom, no subsequent law will ever recapture the lost decorum, and will be seen as merely oppressive.
The momentary triumph of the militant homosexual lobby, which has obviously influenced the Sex Offences Review, will probably turn to dust in the mouths of many homosexuals, and sooner rather than later. The sad fact is that the official promotion of equality of, and non-discrimination against, homosexuals is compatible with increased levels of violence against them, especially in working-class areas.
Tolerance is a two-way street. While it is perfectly right and proper that there should be no persecution or bullying of homosexuals, it is incumbent upon homo- sexuals to take into account the feelings of a large portion of the population about their practices, and behave with circum- spection. Indeed, in a civilised society everyone automatically behaves with cir- cumspection by considering the feelings of others, by not offending them unless it be for a serious moral purpose. Judged by this criterion, Britain is becoming an ever-less civilised society.
In fact, the arguments for permitting homosexual acts in public could perfectly well be taken up by necrophiliacs (and even- tually by paederasts), claiming unfair dis- crimination against them. Who, after all, is harmed by necrophilia? If necrophilia is wrong, it is in large part because it offends against public feeling and decorum: precise- ly the arguments rejected in the case of homosexual behaviour in public. In other words, on this logic, militant necrophiliacs would be justified in claiming unfair discrim- ination and taking their case to the Euro- pean Court of Human Rights.
The Sex Offences Review also proposes a change in the law on rape. Here the full repressive prissiness of the government stands revealed. According to the changes proposed, all acts of sexual intercourse will be considered rape until proved otherwise. This is because any such act where the man `did not take all reasonable steps . . . to ascertain free agreement' are to be counted as rape. In other words, consent to sexual relations will soon have to be as formalised as consent to surgical operations, and every man will have to ask his wife to sign a con- sent form before bed. Sales of Viagra will rocket, but to no effect.
The purse-mouthed puritanism of the Home Office's megalomaniacs is also to be seen in the proposal that a woman under the influence of alcohol cannot be said to have given valid consent to sexual relations. Henceforth, not only will no mean no (itself a stunningly literal-minded doctrine, utterly ignorant of the realities of human communi- cation), but drunk will also mean no.
The law of murder, however, states that a drunken intent is still an intent. Drunken- ness is thus — quite rightly — not a defence to murder. In other words, while a woman who is under the influence of drink will be considered capable of deciding to kill, she will not be considered capable of deciding to have sexual intercourse: and the law of Eng- land will henceforth hold that the decision to go to bed with a man is of graver import, requiring a higher degree of mental clarity, than the decision to kill him.
If the review's recommendations are accepted, the presumption of innocence cannot survive the need to prove all that a man charged with rape will need to prove. With the right to silence already gone, jury trials under threat, and preventive deten- tion of people who have so far done noth- ing wrong under serious consideration, England is becoming a curious and unpleasant mixture of police state and deeply criminalised anarchy.
Previous page
