“One serious objection to recognising and tolerating sexual inversion has always been that it tends to check the population. This was a sound political and social argument in the time of Moses, when a small militant tribe needed to multiply to the full extent of its procreative capacity. It is by no means so valid in our age, when the habitable portions of the globe are rapidly becoming overcrowded. Moreover, we must bear in mind that society under the existing order sanctions female prostitution, whereby men and women, though normally procreative, are sterilized to an indefinite extent.”—J. A. Symonds, “A Problem in Modern Ethics,” p. 82.
“Before Justinian, both Constantine and Theodosius passed laws against sexual inversion, committing the offenders to ‘avenging flames.’ But these statutes were not rigidly enforced, and modern opinion on the subject may be said to flow from Justinian’s legislation. Opinion, in matters of custom and manners, always follows law. Though Imperial edicts could not eradicate a passion which is inherent in human nature, they had the effect of stereotyping extreme punishments in all the codes of Christian nations, and of creating a permanent social antipathy.”—Ibid, p. 13.
“Our modern attitude is sometimes traced back to the Jewish Law and its survival in St. Paul’s opinion on this matter. But the Jewish Law itself had a foundation. Wherever the enlargement of the population becomes a strongly-felt social need—as it was among the Jews in their exaltation of family life, and as it was when the European populations were constituted—there homosexuality has been regarded as a crime, even punishable with death.… It was in the fourth century at Rome that the strong modern opposition to it was formulated in law. The Roman race had long been decaying; sexual perversions of all kinds flourished; the population was dwindling. At the same time Christianity with its Judaic-Pauline antagonism to homosexuality was rapidly spreading. The statesmen of the day, anxious to quicken the failing pulses of national life, utilised this powerful Christian feeling. Constantine, Theodosius, Valentinian, all passed laws against homosexuality—the last, at all events, ordaining as a penalty the vindices flammæ.” Havelock Ellis, op. cit., p. 206.
“At the present time, shoemakers, who make shoes to measure, deal more rationally with individuals than our teachers and school-masters do, in their application to moral principles. The sexually intermediate forms of individuals are treated exactly as if they were good examples of the ideal male or female types. There is wanted an ‘orthopædic’ treatment of the soul, instead of the torture caused by the application of ready-made conventional shapes. The present system stamps out much that is original, uproots much that is truly natural, and distorts much into artificial and unnatural forms.”—O. Weininger, “Sex and Character,” ch. v.
“What is new in my view is that according to it homosexuality cannot be regarded as an atavism or as due to arrested embryonic development, or to incomplete differentiation of sex; it cannot be regarded as an anomaly of rare occurrence interpolating itself in customary complete separation of the sexes. Homosexuality is merely the sexual condition of those intermediate sexual forms that stretch from one ideal sexual condition to the other ideal sexual condition. In my view, all actual organisms have both homosexuality and heterosexuality.”—O. Weininger, “Sex and Character,” ch. iv.
“How is it then that in our age reputed so philanthropic, whole classes of men, on account of inborn mental abnormalities, are marked down and banned, frantically persecuted, publicly branded, and threatened with the severest legal penalties? Any one would hardly believe what gross cases of justiciary murder, morally speaking, still take place in this matter even at the end of the nineteenth century. To the pitiful ignorance of the judges, to the thousand inherited prejudices of public opinion, as well as to the mental slavery of legislative bodies, must it be ascribed that the penal code of most civilised states is still in great measure formulated in the gloomy spirit of the Middle Ages.”—O. de Joux, “Die Enterbten des Liebesglückes,” p. 16.
“Up till now homosexual humanity has found itself in a peculiar position. Its mouth was closed, it could not speak. It was bound hand and foot and could not move. But now there has come an important change. Science has taken the part of these folk and defended their honour … I protest therefore earnestly that these men, whether by means of the Law or any other means, should no longer be branded in the name of Christianity.”—From a letter written by a Catholic priest in reply to a circular sent by the Humane-Science Committee of Berlin. (See “Jahrbuch der Sexuellen Zwischenstufen,” vol. ii., p. 177.)
“Thus the very basest of all trades, that of chantage [blackmailing] is encouraged by the law.… The miserable persecuted wretch, placed between the alternative of paying money down or of becoming socially impossible, losing a valued position, and seeing dishonour burst upon himself and family, pays; and still the more he pays the greedier becomes the vampire who sucks his life-blood, until at last there lies nothing else before him except total financial ruin or disgrace. Who will be astonished if the nerves of an individual in this position are not equal to the horrid strain? In some cases the nerves give way altogether.… Alter the law and instead of increasing vice you will diminish it. The temptation to ply a disgraceful profession with the object of extorting money would be removed.”—“A Problem in Modern Ethics,” pp. 56 and 86.
“You will rightly infer that it is difficult for me to say exactly how I regard (morally) the homosexual tendency. Of this much, however, I am certain that even if it were possible I would not exchange my inverted nature for a normal one. I suspect that the sexual emotions and even inverted ones have a more subtle significance than is generally attributed to them; but modern moralists either fight shy of transcendental interpretations or see none, and I am ignorant and unable to solve the mystery these feelings seem to imply.”—Havelock Ellis, op. cit., p. 65, “case” ix.