[9] With the curious inconsistency, already referred to, that in marriage non-celibacy is a virtue.
[10] Except by Act of Parliament.
[11] The Majority Report of the Divorce Commission is a good instance of the unnecessary hardship which results from half-hearted proposals of this kind. Divorce is to be allowed, for example, after desertion for three years; why not for two? Or again, the wife of an incurable drunkard is to be free to obtain divorce, while the unhappy wife of a man who suffers from violent fits of intermittent drunkenness is to be denied this relief.
[12] I refrain from adding “economic” reasons, for I believe that the State should remove, as far as possible, all such obstacles against healthy parents begetting children.
[13] Procuration for the purpose of prostitution is of course an entirely different matter.
[14] No actual physical harm need result from an incestuous union. The only effect which seems to be caused is that the characteristics to be hereditarily transmitted are doubled. Thus with only a small grain of insanity in a family the chances of aggravated insanity appearing in the offspring of a brother and sister would be considerable.
[15] Spiritual affinity was a bar, so that not only could not godparents marry each other, but there could be no valid unions between a godparent and the child’s father or mother. (Geary’s Marriage and Family Relations.)
[16] Some apology must be made for the use of this hybrid term. The unwarrantable confusion of Greek and Latin terminology must, however, be laid at the door of popular use.
[17] Psychology of Sex; Vol. Sexual Inversion. Dr. Hirschfeld in his Statistischen Vatersuchunge über den Prozentensetz der Homosexuellen, considers that out of 100,000 inhabitants, 94,600 on the average are sexually normal, 1,500 exclusively homosexual, and 3,900 bisexual.
[18] The existence of this danger was admitted in a debate in the House of Lords on August 15, 1921, on The Criminal Law Amendment Bill. The Earl of Malmesbury, speaking on a proposal to apply criminal prosecution to homosexual offences among women, declared that “the opportunity for blackmail will be vastly and enormously increased.” Other speakers concurred in this view, and it was partly on this ground that the proposal was thrown out.