Students: The Free-Sex Movement

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Since then, in less sensational form, student committees promoting sexual freedom have been organized at Stanford, the University of Texas and U.C.L.A. Mainly they demand that college health services provide contraceptives to any students desiring them, and insist that sexual conduct in private is strictly a personal matter not to be regulated by schools or laws. In Austin, The Texas Student League for Responsible Sexual Freedom has 18 members so far, led by Senior Tom Maddux. He contends that limiting birth control pills to married women is "ridiculous," society's attitude toward homosexuality is "hypocritical," and laws against sodomy should be "stricken or radically changed."

Uninterested Majority. The Stanford group, called the Sexual Rights Forum, has secured 450 student signatures in a drive for a campus referendum on whether the health service should be "authorized to prescribe contraceptives to any student desiring them." It expects to get the necessary 600 petitioners, although the referendum would not be binding on the university. Forum Leader James Ayre, a graduate student in mineral engineering, argues that "any discrimination by the health service on the basis of marital status in prescribing contraceptives implies a moral judgment on premarital intercourse." Stanford Health Center Director Maurice Osborne has rejected the group's arguments as "a tragically crude and simplistic approach to an enormously complex and sensitive issue." Widespread distribution of contraceptives, he says, "might reinforce existing pressures that already urge premarital intercourse."

As in most other campus protests, the great majority of students seems either uninterested in or scornful of the sexual-freedom movement. Stanford Junior Suzanne Lefranc condemns the Forum for "turning sex into a personal joke—selling lapel buttons with snickering slogans." And Berkeley's Jerry Goldstein, president of the campus student government, calls it all "so absurd that I don't think students are paying attention to it." As for any legal action against licentiousness at house parties, Berkeley Police Chief Addison Fording contends that he cannot arrest anyone unless someone present files a complaint.