Secondly I would argue that despite the very obvious shortcomings of The Wolfenden Report, in the kind of society we live in we cannot do without the support of a substantial liberal constituency, in parliament as well as outside. It is noteworthy that the basic liberal arguments put forward by The Wolfenden Report regarding the limits of law in matters of sexual morality have been used to further the repeal of criminalising laws in many American states. In the USA, with their rather different historical, constitutional and legal frameworks, the discussions about rights have often been more high profile than the equivalent UK ones–at least until recently. In this respect, it is noteworthy that it was the American psychiatric professions who, in the face of fierce opposition, succeeded in deleting homosexuality from the classifications of mental illness in the DSM manuals in 1973. Subsequently, many American psychoanalytic institutes have issued public non-discriminatory policy statements as regards training and so forth. Nothing so public has happened here in the psychiatric or psychoanalytic bodies, apart from within UKCP. Kaplan, an American lawyer and gay activist, in Sexual Justice (1997) usefully lays out three essential aspects of lesbian and gay rights: decriminalisation; protection by the state against discrimination along the lines of civil rights arguments; and social recognition of lesbian and gay forms of relationship and association, in which he includes a right to privacy, or freedom of intimate association. This is a more positive spin on privacy as a right to sexual freedom, in which sexual relationships and identities can be forged and lived out, as opposed to the more negative one of the freedom of solitary individuals to be left alone, free from the criminalising intrusion of the law, which was the version of privacy offered by the Wolfenden reforms. We only have to remind ourselves of the many countries where all homosexuality is illegal and heavily punished to appreciate the advantages that come with liberalism, whatever its obvious insufficiencies.
