THE city council should resist demands to refuse to renew the licence for the sex shop at 54 Cowley Road.

The shop sells legally permitted publications and has been in business for many years.

The arguments for forcing it to close are based on false premises and would threaten important civil liberties.

No evidence has been produced to support the assertion that it was responsible for the terrible crimes revealed by the Bullfinch enquiry, other than a remark about the Cowley Road in general by a lawyer seeking to mitigate his client’s guilt.

Reports of similar gangs operating in at least 10 other cities across Britain show that, tragically, these crimes were part of a national phenomenon.

In fact, serious sex crimes are much more common in repressive societies than in societies which tolerate different lifestyles.

The crimes concerned did not result from excessive tolerance, but from contempt on the part of a group of men towards young women whose lifestyle conflicted with what they had grown up believing to be the only acceptable one for young females.

My family and I have lived off the Cowley Road for almost 40 years and we consider the claim that there is widespread opposition to the sex shop in the community to be completely unjustified.

Some of the 10 letters opposing the licence may be spontaneous expressions of individual concern, but it is noteworthy that two of them came from politicians from the Green Party, which has recently been involved in a national campaign to restrict the publication of material of an allegedly sexual nature in the national press.

Most people who we know in this area take issues of freedom of expression very seriously and would be deeply concerned by what would amount to censorship.

PATRICK GRAY
Divinity Road
Oxford