Jonah: That second correspondent of yours illustrates the old legal approach, i.e. that homosexuality is a thing you **do**. The current sensibility in western societies is that homosexuality is something you **are**. This is, as I pointed out in the pages of NR a year or so ago, quite a profound metaphysical shift… Although, as is often the case with sea-changes in the culture, it only brings to the fore ideas that have always been around. One of the very earliest comments about homosexuality that I can recall hearing, uttered by an aunt of mine at the time of the Vassall case in 1962, was: “Poor things, they can’t help it.”