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As Britain's new sexual offences bill trundles through its final stages (it'll get passed later this summer), only the faintest of voices are being raised against its most draconian inclusions. True to form, the Blair administration has bowed to demands by mainstream homosexual and womens' lobbies, while capitulating to public hysteria-- much of it government-induced-- about "under-age" sex. In the process, children themselves may now be classified as offenders, while some gay men risk new brands of discrimination.

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Ostensibly the legislation clears up anomalies existing in British law since before the incarceration of Oscar Wilde more than a century ago. No longer will "cottaging" be an offense between consenting adults (though you'd better make sure the door is firmly shut-- a definite challenge in some of our quaintest and most attractive public loos). Many caught with their trousers down over the last few years ended up on the "sex-offenders register" and will now thankfully be struck off that repugnant list.

Britain's biggest lesbian and gay rights lobby, Stonewall, seems content with all this. But perhaps it hasn't read the bill in full. If so, then it clearly doesn't care about other clauses which will drastically curb the activities of younger gays, while threatening new restrictions on sexual education, worse even than the notorious Clause 28. (This is the provision, introduced by a former Tory government, which sought to penalize local education authorities' "promotion" of homosexuality. Though never used, the prohibition is still on the statute book).

Under the looming Sexual Offences Act, an 18-year old having sex however consensual, with a 15-year-old, may get banged up for a maximum of 14 years. Two adults groping each other in the bushes, and witnessed by an under-16-year-old, whose presence the prosecution "proves" excited them in any way, could spend ten years at "Her Majesty's Pleasure." (The state doesn't even have to prove the lad or lassie knew what was going on: the adult intention to excite is sufficient).

Worse, if a child (here defined as anyone under 18) "incites" a range of sexual acts with any other "child," he or she will be as guilty as if they were adult. Conviction could get them incarcerated for five long years. An equivalent penalty applies to anyone over 18 getting it on with a younger partner below 16 with whom they occupy a "position of trust"-- even if just a year or two separates them. Insidiously, the age of consent, supposedly fixed in Britain at 16 for both men and women, is about to be massively breached.

What won't be challenged, however, is the institution of marriage, with which the Blair administration finds as much favor as did its Thatcherite predecessor and the prime minister's bosom buddy across the pond. If a 16-year-old girl and a 50-year-old man have officially sealed the bond, they can do what they want in bed together. But, since the British government still refuses gay men the ordinance of holy matrimony, the older partner in an active gay relationship with (say) a 17-year-old could be heavily fined or even end up behind bars.

The most publicized addition to this lexicon of oppression will be the crime of "grooming," punishable by up to 14 years in the clink. Last year, this was promoted as a means of curbing adults masquerading as kids in internet chat rooms in order to have underage sex. (If there were any doubts this clause wouldn't pass, they were crushed in May by the headlined case of a 36-year old Cambridge electronics engineer who admitted intercourse with a 13-year girl he'd "met" in this fashion, and with one of her friends to whom she'd introduced him. His sentence of three years was greeted with common outrage at its leniency, although the girl had herself posed as a 16-year-old in order to attract someone she believed was six years her senior).

In fact, the pending legislation casts its net far wider than the world wide web. Any adult meeting an under-16-year-old with just the intention of having sex can go down for five years. This applies to adults linking-up with any youngster anywhere in the world, even where-- as in much of Europe-- the effective age of consent falls below that age.

Moreover, a few weeks ago, the government announced it would include the new offence of simply "giving to a child anything that relates to sexual activity or contains a reference to such activity." In a stroke the much narrower prohibitions of Clause 28 were expanded into an arbitrary universal "catch-all." For the first time in the relatively smooth and muted two years course of public debate over the bill, respected professionals got rattled. Nick Mazur, of the Periodical Publishers Association, pointed out that the clause would "restrict the access of young people to bona fide advice and information on sexual issues." Lord Falconer, the Home Office minister promoting the measure, blandly acknowledged this might indeed prove the case. "In theory the requirement could catch the sex education teacher or a biology teacher at a school showing children diagrams or models of reproduction," he declared.

Although promising that those not "intending to harm" a child won't be prosecuted, the government has willfully avoided defining these very terms. It's scarcely imaginable that a married woman with a clean record would get hauled into court for academically describing sexual positions to a 15-year-old. But what about the gay help line counsellor, or 20-year-old in a lesbian-gay youth group, once arrested for cottaging, who dares hand a condom to a sexually-active young teenager? The question hangs dangerously in the air. However, to my knowledge, no lesbian or gay lobby group has even raised it.

Instead it's been left to Britain's equivalent of the ACLU-- Liberty-- to articulate fears that others fail to recognize. Says John Wadham, the group's director: "There is a real danger that we lose sight of the best ways to make all our children safer. Provisions like those on grooming risk feeding fear and mistrust in ways that distract from the serious business of child protection-- which is about openness, education and talking frankly with our children. The danger is that [the new law] would mean prosecuting people, not for anything they've done but for things someone thinks they might do-- because someone is second-guessing their thoughts."

Will Blair and his colleagues heed such warnings-- even though they're hardly radical? The answer is self-evident. After all, this is a band of interventionists which has amply proved its readiness to manipulate evidence, ignore international law, and sacrifice its "own" young men, to counter a largely fabricated threat of "terrorism." The Sexual Offences Act represents yet another accommodation to the US administration's worldview on dealing decisively with social nonconformity. And it will distance Britain significantly further from what's left of liberal European penal policy.