Education
"Under the guidance of the Review Doctor Derrick Sherwin Bailey (1910-1984), a group of clergy, doctors and lawyers studied the existing materials on homosexuality.
"Under the guidance of the Review Doctor Derrick Sherwin Bailey (1910-1984), a group of clergy, doctors and lawyers studied the existing materials on homosexuality.
They then produced a privately printed pamphlet titled The Problem of Homosexuality. This interim report, written by Bailey, signalled the first twentieth-century extended treatment of homosexuality by an ecclesiastical body. The Moral Welfare Council recognized the role of the State in regulating society, but it also acknowledged that the rights of the homosexual were being violated, and this issue needed to be addressed.
While working on the pamphlet, Bailey independently completed Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition.
lieutenant was criticized for exonerating the Church for persecuting homosexuals, yet it is still considered a landmark work on this topic. He scrutinized both the Bible and subsequent thought, drawing focus to some heretofore ignored issues, such as intertestamental literature, legislation of Christian emperors, the penitentials, and the link between heresy and sodomy.
Bailey testified to the Wolfenden Committee in support of the reform of the laws on homosexuality. The historian Patrick Higgins describes some of Bailey"s other views an "interesting cocktail of beliefs".
Higgins lists Bailey as believing that homosexuality will eventually disappear "because he thought that modern people would create better marriages, which in turn would make better homes, producing children who would naturally follow the right sexual path".
He also proposed that homosexual men should be invited into the homes of married heterosexuals in order so that the heterosexuals could "share some of their joy with them". While he believes male homosexuality to be pitied rather than criminalised, Higgins reports that he had little sympathy with lesbians: he considered lesbianism "socially more undesirable than male homosexuality". In 1962 Bailey became a Canon Residentiary of Wells Cathedral, publishing works on its history and dying in the city of Wells, Somerset.