Editing Wolfenden report (section)

==Aftermath==
The report's recommendations attracted considerable public debate, including an exchange of views in publications by [[Lord Devlin]], a leading British judge, whose ideas and publications argued against the report's philosophical basis, and [[H.&nbsp;L.&nbsp;A. Hart]], a leading jurisprudential scholar, who provided argument in its support.

In ''The Enforcement of Morals'', Devlin states that the Wolfenden report "is recognized to be an excellent study of two very difficult legal and social problems".{{sfn|Devlin|1965}} Devlin attacks the principle, derived from [[John Stuart Mill]]'s ''[[On Liberty]]'', that the law ought not concern itself with "private immorality", saying that the report "requires special circumstances to be shown to justify the intervention of the law. I think that this is wrong in principle".{{sfn|Devlin|1965|p=11}}

In late 1957, shortly after the report was published, the General Assembly of the [[Church of England]], by a vote of 155 to 138, passed a resolution "That this Assembly generally approves the principles on which the criminal law concerned with sexual behaviour should be based as stated by the Wolfenden Committee, and also its recommendations relating to homosexuality, but considers that the recommendations relating to prostitution require further study".<ref>{{hansard|house=lords|url=1957/dec/04/homosexual-offences-and-prostitution#column_734|title=HOMOSEXUAL OFFENCES AND PROSTITUTION|access-date=26 June 2023|date=4 December 1957}}</ref>

The recommendations eventually led to the passage of the [[Sexual Offences Act 1967]], applying to England and Wales only, that replaced the previous [[sodomy law|law on sodomy]] contained in the [[Offences against the Person Act 1861]] and the 1885 [[Labouchere Amendment]] which outlawed every homosexual act short of sodomy. The Act did not become law until a decade after the report was published in 1957.

The historian Patrick Higgins has described a number of flaws with the report: "its failure to understand or appreciate (except in the most negative terms) the importance of the homosexual subculture".<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41851871|title=Obituary: Gay rights pioneer Roger Lockyer|last=Hutton|first=Alice|date=4 November 2017|publisher=[[BBC]]|access-date=14 October 2024}}</ref> {{sfn|Higgins|1996|p=89}}

It later became known publicly, (in 2017), that Wolfenden's son [[Jeremy Wolfenden]] was gay when historian Roger Lockyer stated the fact in a [[BBC]] interview.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41851871|title=Obituary: Gay rights pioneer Roger Lockyer|last=Hutton|first=Alice|date=4 November 2017|publisher=[[BBC]]|access-date=14 October 2024}}</ref>{{sfn|Lewis|2016|p=7}}

In 1997, John Wolfenden came 45th in the ''[[Pink Paper]]''’s list of the “top 500 lesbian and gay heroes”.<ref>''Pink Paper'' (500). 26 September 1997. p.&nbsp;19.</ref>