However, Schweitzer would go on to become President of the German Labor Union, and the first Social Democrat elected to a parliament in Europe. August Bebel's "Woman under Socialism" (1879), the "single work dealing with sexuality most widely read by rank-and-file members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)", can be seen as another example of the ambiguous position towards homosexuality in the German labor movement. On the one hand, Bebel warned socialists of the dangers of same-sex love. Bebel attributed "this crime against nature" in both men and women to sexual indulgence and excess, describing it as an upper-class, metropolitan and foreign vice. On the other hand, he did publicly support the efforts to legalize homosexuality. For example, he signed the first petition of the "Wissenschaftlich-humanitärer Kreis", a study group led by Magnus Hirschfeld, trying to explain homosexuality from a scientific point of view and pushing for decriminalization. In an article for Gay News in 1978, John Lauritsen considers August Bebel as the first important politician "to speak out in public debate" in the favor of gay rights since he attacked the criminialization of homosexuality in a Reichstag debate in 1898. The leading figure of the LGBT movement in Germany from the turn of the 20th century until the Nazi government came to power in 1933 was undoubtedly Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld, who was also a socialist and supporter of the Women's Movement, formed the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee to campaign against German Penal Code Section 175 which outlawed male-male sex. Hirschfeld's organisation did a deal with the SPD (of which Lassalle and Schweitzer had been members) to get them to put forward a bill in the Reichstag in 1898, but it was opposed in the Reichstag and failed to pass. Most of Hirschfeld's circle of homosexual activists had socialist politics, including Kurt Hiller, Richard Linsert, Johanna Elberskirchen and Bruno Vogel. After the toppling of the German monarchy, the struggle against § 175 was continued by some social democrats. The German Minister of Justice Gustav Radbruch, member of the Social Democratic Party, tried to erase the paragraphe from the German penal law. However, his efforts were to no avail. In Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism", he advocates for an egalitarian society where wealth is shared by all, while warning of the dangers of authoritarian socialism that would crush individuality.