SEX AND SCIENCE
sible and humane next best thing. Their opinion of the etiology
of homosexuality as lying m some warp--as our culture judges it–
of the psychic structure has not, I believe, changed. And I think that
they would say that the condition that produced the homosexuality
also produces other character traits on which judgment could be
passed. This judgment need by no means
be
totally adverse; as passed
upon individuals
it
need not be adverse at all; but there can be no
doubt that a society in which homosexuality was dominant or even
accepted would be different in the nature and quality of its life
from a society in which homosexuality was censured.
The refusal of the Report to hold such a view leads us at this
point to take into account what seem to be certain motives that
animate the work. And when we do, we see how very characteristically
American a document it is.
In speaking of its motives, I have in mind chiefly the impulse
toward acceptance and liberation, the broad and generous desire
for others not to be harshly judged. Much in the Report is to be
understood as a recoil from the crude and often brutal rejection
which society has made of the persons it calls aberrant. The Report
has the intention of habituating its readers to the idea of sexuality
in all its manifestations, to establish, as it were, a democratic pluralism
of sexuality.
This good impulse shows itself very clearly in certain parts of
our intellectual life, often in the more or less official parts. It is, for
example, far more established in the universities than most of us, with
our habits of criticism of America, particularly of American univer–
sities, easily admit. This generosity of mind is to
be
much admired,
yet it is often associated with an almost willed intellectual weakness,
with a preference for not making intellectual distinctions, perhaps
out of fear that they may turn out to be social discriminations. Some–
how the democratic virtues are inclined, in the intellectual life, to lead
from the large acceptance of the facts of society to the belief that
any use of these facts which perceives values and demonstrates con–
sequences is dangerous.
One result of this set of mind is the worship of the factuality
of the fact. There seem to be two criteria for factuality. One is the
material physicality of the fact and its relative removal from idea
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