[271] The main point to be
insured is that no boy or girl who has not reached years of discretion
should be seduced or abused by an older person, and this point is equally
well guaranteed on the basis introduced by the _Code Napoleon_. However
shameful, disgusting, personally immoral, and indirectly antisocial it may
be for two adult persons of the same sex, men or women, to consent
together to perform an act of sexual intimacy in private, there is no
sound or adequate ground for constituting such act a penal offense by law.
One of the most serious objections to the legal recognition of private
"gross indecency" is the obvious fact that only in the rarest cases can
such indecency become known to the police, and we thus perpetrate what is
very much like a legal farce. "The breaking of few laws," as Moll truly
observes, regarding the German law, "so often goes unpunished as of this."
It is the same in England, as is amply evidenced by the fact that, of the
English sexual inverts, whose histories I have obtained, not one, so far
as I am aware, has ever appeared in a police-court on this charge.
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