This section is from the book "Human Sexuality", by J. Richardson Parke. Also available from Amazon: Human Sexuality.
In dealing with a question involving a grave point of morals, as this unquestionably does, it is difficult to repress views inculcated by a long course of religious training; but however the present writer may regard the matter from an ethical standpoint, and however much he may feel disposed to put his individual bann upon it, as upon kindred forms of social vice, he feels at the same time that such a course would be not only entirely unworthy the spirit of enlightened research, but would accomplish far less in the amelioration of the evil than that full, free and frank discussion of the problem, with its logical causes and sequences, to which he has, in this work, addressed himself.
Heretofore the Church has unreservedly condemned both heterosexual and homosexual indulgence,with what effect has already been pointed out; and I am satisfied that only when medical science shall take up and [deal with the problem in its own way, making it a matter of health and decency rather than religion and morality, and of a happy life here, rather than a miserable one hereafter, will the subject be found so "full of interest that wc need not fear it, bo full of grave social actuality that we are bound to face it," as a recent writer remarks; and one far more readily amenable to the laws of rational logic than to the ipse dixit of spiritual authority. At least from this viewpoint, and no other, it is my present purpose to regard it.
With sexuality, as with life itself, we begin and end in the unknown. No one is cognizant at what point in embryonic development sex differentiation begins; but we do know, as I have heretofore stated, that up to a certain stage there is absolute sex unity; and that the differences which subsequently develop, both of sexual mechanism and desire, are predetermined by influences, whether divine, accidental, or fixedly embryologies], which subserve those prime needs of social evolution, the numerical parity of the sexes and the propagation of the human race.
 
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