SEX MORALITY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 April 1938, Page 8

SEX MORALITY

PRIEST'S OUTSPOKEN ADDRESS.

DENUNCIATION OF TRAFFIC IN OBSCENITY.

By Telegraph.—Press Association. AUCKLAND, April 11

The attitude of New Zealand toward the practice of birth control and the ■importation of pornographic and obscene literature were subjects discussed by the Very Rev Owen Dudley, London, in an address at St Patrick’s Cathedral tonight. “The world will not admit sin today,” Father Dudley said. “Take for instance the amazing statement issued recently by the Wellington committee on birth control. The committee did not regard the practice of birth prevention as a moral question but as a matter of human expediency and judgment. Birth prevention or the use of some artificial means of preventing conception is most emphatically a moral question. It is intimately bound up with the morality of sex relations and with marriage. Marriage was given by the Creator for the purpose of procreation, that is, for the purpose of bringing children into the world. To use artificial means of preventing conception is to frustrate the very purpose and end for which marriage was given. It is a perversion of a natural end and frustration of the end of natural law. “Natural laws are God’s laws,” Father Dudley continued, “and therefore the use of contraceptives is defiance of God’s law and of God himself. That is why this practice is gravely sinful. “I am also very sorry to find in New Zealand,” Father Dudley added, “such an immense number of shops selling pornographic literature, a great deal of it from America and a great deal of it camouflaged under art and science. No honest man, however, will be gulled by that. It is scarcely possible to walk down any street in any New Zealand city without being confronted by obscene literature and pictures. This particular kind of filth must inevitably undermine the morality of New Zealand’s youth and therefore the moral life of the nation. It will mean ultimately immense increase in lasciviousness and licence, followed by crime, as is invariably the case. I sincerely hope civil authority in New Zealand will take steps to close down this traffic in obscene literature, otherwise it will be contributing to the degeneracy of the people, whose best interests civil authority is supposed to guard.”