This particular man happens to call himself a "radical"; but I could
tell you of similar men in the highest social circles, or in the
political world, the theatrical world, the "sporting" world; they are in
every rank of life, and are just as definitely and certainly menaces to
human welfare and progress as pirates on the high seas or highwaymen on
the road. Nor are they confined to the males; the world is full of women
who use their sex charms for predatory purposes, and some of them are
far too clever for any law that you or I can contrive at present. But I
think we might begin by refusing to let any man or woman have more than
two divorces in one lifetime, in any state or part of the world. If any
man or woman tries three times to find happiness in love, and fails each
time, we have a right to assume that the fault must lie with that
person, and not with the three partners.
I think we may go further yet; having made wise laws of love and
marriage, taking into consideration all human needs, we have a right to
require that men and women shall obey the laws. At present the great
mass of the public has sympathy for the law-breaker; just as, in old
days, the peasants could not help admiring the outlaw who resisted
unjust land laws and robbed the rich, or as today, under the capitalist
regime, we can not withhold our sympathy from political prisoners, even
though they have committed acts of violence which we deplore. But when
we have made sex laws that we know are just and sensible--then we shall
consider that we have the right to restrain sex criminals, and in
extreme cases we shall avail ourselves of the skill of science to
perform a surgical operation which will render him unable in future to
prey upon the love needs of people who are placed at his mercy by their
best qualities, their unselfishness and lack of suspicion.
We clear out foul-smelling weeds from our garden, because we wish to
raise beautiful flowers and useful herbs therein. There lives in
California a student of plant life, who has shown us what we can do, not
by magic or by superhuman efforts, but simply by loving plants, by
watching them ceaselessly, understanding their ways, and guiding their
sex-life to our own purposes. We can perform what to our ignorant
ancestors would have seemed to be miracles; we can actually make all
sorts of new plants, which will continue to breed their own kind, and
survive forever if we give them proper care. In other words, Luther
Burbank has shown us that we can "change plant nature."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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