Kiss me sister!

[BeBMan]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
In western culture where you are only likely to see your cousins a few times in your lifetime, and your 2nd cousins maybe once, there should be no consideration of counsins as family as so no reason not to have sex with them.

The issue is that family and sex don't go together. This is what (should) keep fathers from having sex with their daughters, and siblings from having sex with eachother.

Several countries that are part of western culture don't punish incest (Germany still does though).

[Jon Miller]

That's because many western countries have many people like Heraclitus within them.

JM

[Wezil]

Originally posted by Kidicious


A 3rd cousin is hot

Pic?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Wezil


Pic?

I don't keep pictures.

[BeBMan]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
That's because many western countries have many people like Heraclitus within them.

JM

Probably. I'm not sure what you mean by that though.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Hmm, incest. A few thoughts on this tricky issue:

1. The choice of a partner (whether it's marriage, life, sexual, etc.) is one of the most personal choices a person can make, and generally one that the state should not interfere with.

1a: Confounding factor: Does this include the right to decide to have sexual relations with a family member?

Counterblast:

2. The state does have an interest in the welfare of citizens, as that's what a state does. Does this extend to future citizens? Does it extend to genetic welfare and genetic likelihood? Does it override the individual's right to choose their partner.

Other confounding factors:

2a: Incest as a practice does medically give rise to a greater incidence of children with genetic disorders.

2b: Incest as a social practice does give rise to a greater incidence of sexual abuse for the people involved.

2c: (Perhaps the least compelling reason, but here goes anyway.) Incest as a social practice is not tolerated by the voting majority of people on moral grounds. [The same could be said at various points in history of homosexuality, sex before marriage, and women's suffrage.]

If I were in charge of a Western style democratic government and I had to make the call, I'd say the individual's right to personal freedoms should override all else unless a serious government interest is at stake. (A good example would be a person who enjoys setting buildings on fire. His enjoyment should definitely be inferior to the public safety interest.)

In most cases, sexual practices happen behind closed doors and thus do not generally affect public safety. This was the explicit ruling in Lawrence v. Texas where the US Supreme Court refuses to find a gay couple guilty when police raided their bedroom and found them having sex, in contravention of a Texas anti-sodomy law.

This view is much stronger in the US than in Europe, where personal privacy is less strictly protected against government activity. Regina v. Brown (1993) in the UK showed that gay men engaging in sadomasochistic sexual practices in the privacy of a home could still be charged with a crime, even if all men are consenting adults. A similar case recently found a Scottish man guilty of having sex with his bicycle in his apartment when a maid walked in on him.

So it looks like from a constitutional basis, the criminalization of incest would have greater traction in Europe than in the US. (For the record, in China it's forbidden for people related by blood within five generations to marry or have sex - far stricter than the three-generation commonality recognized by medical science. In Korea it's illegal for anybody with the same family name.)

Then we move onto the issue of harm to a person. If a person's being injured, then the state has a compelling interest to intervene.

Concerning the participants, one major argument for banning incest is that family members are more likely to be able to abuse each other and get away with it undetected. This is especially true for underage participants.

My response to this is that there already is a law of sexual consent that protects young people against sexual contact. If they're below a certain age, they lack the legal standing to give informed consent, and thus the statute defines is as rape (hence "statutory rape"). It's unclear whether this would or should "stack" with an incest charge. If it does not, then it's largely superfluous, and if it does, then a counter argument is that it will encourage the government to violate household privacy (especially problematic when concerning adults).

This all gets a lot trickier when you consider the possibility of adult participants. Presumably an adult is free to make their own decisions in sex, love, and marriage, and (as any mother-in-law will tell you) this even extends to their freedom to make bad decisions, free of government interference. The argument of protecting them for their own good no longer holds with such strength as it did for children. Instead, if the government wants to regulate this, you'd need to look at other justifications for other "guardianship" groups, e.g. mentally unstable adults, physically disabled adults, etc. I'm not sure that people who engage in incest are any more or less able than the average adult citizen. Absent a clear showing of sexual abuse, rape, or other wrongdoing, it doesn't make much sense to forbid sexual contact between two adults based on the vague fear that there may be emotional or physical coercion.

The final issue is the state's interest in citizens, including future citizens, and thus including the genetic welfare of children born from incestuous relations. This argument is (to me) somewhat stronger than the argument of "banning it for the participants' welfare" but it still has several important weaknesses.

First, child rearing is generally the province of the parent, not the state. Granted, the state can intervene in exceptional cases when the parent is unable to take care of their child (e.g. severe mental retardation) or unfit to take care of their child (e.g. behavioral problems such as severe alcoholism etc.). Here, if the state takes away the child, or the parent's right to have a child, it's doing it purely on the basis of genetic likelihood. Taken to its logical conclusion, the state would be discriminating against adult sexual partners who are related, and not against, say, adult congenitally blind sexual partners are who not related. If the state takes its concern for a child's genetic wellbeing seriously enough to ban incest between consenting adults, that then opens up a whole other can of worms about whether it can or should ban sex between people who have other genetic conditions, including such conditions as serious as cancer, through to such incidental conditions as color blindness or bad knees. If the state refused to allow two people who were mentally disabled to marry and have children, then the incest ban might make some sort of sense (at least as far as consistency goes) but up until that point, the incest ban singles out one demographic and leaves many others alone.


Socially speaking, incest does have several risks associated with it, firstly emotional injury to the participants. But if laws are intended to punish actual wrongdoing, then I'd argue that mere sexual contact is not enough to make a pair of consenting related adults into criminals. The state would have to prosecute and convict them of something separate - e.g. actually prove that somebody was traumatized or hurt. In the case where two family members consent to sexual relations, the state has no business interfering absent any injury.

Medically speaking, incest carries the risk of increased genetic disability, and the state might claim to try to prevent that. However, before so doing, the state has to better define the limits of its intervention. Does it want to extend this genetic police work to the mentally retarded? To those with congenital illnesses? (More provocatively, to people of a different skin color or eye shape?) If the parents possess the intention and the ability and resources to take care of their own children, why should the state care?

Also noteworthy is the fact that marriage and sex are no longer focused on childbearing as it was back in the day when most common law and much statutory law was written. Birth control now gives individuals unprecedented control over the option to have children, and this factor further weakens the state's right to intervene on grounds of likelihood of genetic imperfection.


Needless to say, all of the above arguments in support of state intervention may have their flaws, but they are ultimately superior to the most common argument. And that common argument is "We don't like it, so the state should ban it." Sadly, when you talk about incest, homosexuality, or indeed anything in the minority, this is the most frequently seen argument.

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
That's because many western countries have many people like Heraclitus within them.

JM

I am going to take the positive interpretation of that post. That western countries have lots of tolerant open minded people who do not feel that the state should limit the sexual practices of their citizens, as long as these do not violate human rights of other citizens.

[Heresson]

I think incest should not be illegal

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia

Also noteworthy is the fact that marriage and sex are no longer focused on childbearing as it was back in the day when most common law and much statutory law was written. Birth control now gives individuals unprecedented control over the option to have children, and this factor further weakens the state's right to intervene on grounds of likelihood of genetic imperfection.


Needless to say, all of the above arguments in support of state intervention may have their flaws, but they are ultimately superior to the most common argument. And that common argument is "We don't like it, so the state should ban it." Sadly, when you talk about incest, homosexuality, or indeed anything in the minority, this is the most frequently seen argument.

A to her entire post. I don’t find a flaw with its logic and I think anyone who overcomes the "yuck" factor can agree with it. I would have made something very much like it had I wanted to put the energy into it. This post pretty much sums up my opinions.


Alinestra Covelia



Too bad you aren't my sister.

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by Heresson
I think incest should not be illegal

The state has no business mandating what consenting adults can and can not do in their bedrooms.

[Alinestra Covelia]

See, in this particular German case the facts are quite tangled.

It looks like the two adults were consenting adults (so, a check for the "leave them alone" camp) and they had in fact been separated from childhood, only meeting past the German age of consent which is 14 for males and 16 for females (yet another reason for not prosecuting).

However, they also had children, not once but several times. Although this might well carry weight in America, where personal protections are very strong for parental interests, in a European state where the state's interests are constitutionally stronger it may be a serious strike against them - provided that the state has some sort of justification for its genetic supervision. I'd have thought that in a country like Germany, which is historically no stranger to eugenics policies that mobilized a fair bit of international criticism (1933-1945) would be extra careful to define what the state's rights are in that respect.

An older BBC article says the father is an "unemployed locksmith" so there may be an element of whether the state has to expend resources in taking care of children with greater needs than usual. This runs into two questions: should you give leeway to parents who can shoulder the entire cost of raising their kids (and should you cut a break for parents who may have lost their jobs as a result of social taboos)? and secondly should you then prohibit the freedom of the mentally disabled and other genetically handicapped groups from having children?

The German court needs to uphold the law as passed by the legislators, so you can't really fault them for that. But the judges should have taken a long hard look at what the laws really stand for, and should have asked some pointed questions to the legislators as to what they're really trying to achieve.

You could probably start by removing the outright ban on incest between adults, but then reinforcing or strengthening rape punishments if the rape happens between family members. Or, raise the age of consent between family members, to ensure that they really are consenting and to lessen the possibility of coercion.

Then they might look at drafting a statute showing the state's stance on child support for various genetic classes of parents. They could take a hands-off approach entirely, or they can outline limits where the state will not provide services (which is what China does if you violate the one-child policy... instead of killing the child, which is what a lot of outsiders thought they did, they withdraw state sponsorship for education and government jobs etc). Or they could outline a more supervisory schedule of checking various socioeconomic factors and then taking the children away if the parents are clearly unable to provide for them and seem like they do not want to control the number of children they have. In all cases this would have to include a clear statement of the state's stance on other genetic classes such as the mentally disabled.


Ultimately it's up to the legislators to decide, but the more clarity behind their decision, the better. If they're going to make a decision that limits personal freedoms, let them err on the side of over-justification rather than under-justification. And as I mentioned above, the reason of "More voters are against it than for it" is not a real justification at all.

[Alinestra Covelia]

I should probably point out that my brother does not share my views on homosexuality but he does share my views on incest.

Given that I'm his sister you might have thought he'd be the other way round.

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia
See, in this particular German case the facts are quite tangled.

It looks like the two adults were consenting adults (so, a check for the "leave them alone" camp) and they had in fact been separated from childhood, only meeting past the German age of consent which is 14 for males and 16 for females (yet another reason for not prosecuting).

However, they also had children, not once but several times. Although this might well carry weight in America, where personal protections are very strong for parental interests, in a European state where the state's interests are constitutionally stronger it may be a serious strike against them - provided that the state has some sort of justification for its genetic supervision. I'd have thought that in a country like Germany, which is historically no stranger to eugenics policies that mobilized a fair bit of international criticism (1933-1945) would be extra careful to define what the state's rights are in that respect.

An older BBC article says the father is an "unemployed locksmith" so there may be an element of whether the state has to expend resources in taking care of children with greater needs than usual. This runs into two questions: should you give leeway to parents who can shoulder the entire cost of raising their kids (and should you cut a break for parents who may have lost their jobs as a result of social taboos)? and secondly should you then prohibit the freedom of the mentally disabled and other genetically handicapped groups from having children?

The German court needs to uphold the law as passed by the legislators, so you can't really fault them for that. But the judges should have taken a long hard look at what the laws really stand for, and should have asked some pointed questions to the legislators as to what they're really trying to achieve.

You could probably start by removing the outright ban on incest between adults, but then reinforcing or strengthening rape punishments if the rape happens between family members. Or, raise the age of consent between family members, to ensure that they really are consenting and to lessen the possibility of coercion.

Then they might look at drafting a statute showing the state's stance on child support for various genetic classes of parents. They could take a hands-off approach entirely, or they can outline limits where the state will not provide services (which is what China does if you violate the one-child policy... instead of killing the child, which is what a lot of outsiders thought they did, they withdraw state sponsorship for education and government jobs etc). Or they could outline a more supervisory schedule of checking various socioeconomic factors and then taking the children away if the parents are clearly unable to provide for them and seem like they do not want to control the number of children they have. In all cases this would have to include a clear statement of the state's stance on other genetic classes such as the mentally disabled.

Well there is nothing a priori wrong with eugenic policies, it is just hard to enforce them effectively without violating personal rights. So if Germany wants it can have eugenic laws, but like I said in the age of effective and cheap contraception there is no reason to outlaw sex among consenting adults even if their genetic material does put them of risk, if they happen to conceive, of burdening state run welfare.

Like you said, the judges should have asked the tough question of “Why do we have this law?”.


Also if the German couple wanted not only to have sex, but to have children as well, why not opt for artificial insemination? Don’t some welfare states cover some of the expenses for people with genetic disabilities for such measures?

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia
Ultimately it's up to the legislators to decide, but the more clarity behind their decision, the better. If they're going to make a decision that limits personal freedoms, let them err on the side of over-justification rather than under-justification. And as I mentioned above, the reason of "More voters are against it than for it" is not a real justification at all.

Yes, that is one of the reasons have constitutions and accept the concept of human rights in democracies, so that the majority does not infringe upon minority rights or impose arbitrary laws & penalties upon them.

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia
I should probably point out that my brother does not share my views on homosexuality but he does share my views on incest.

Given that I'm his sister you might have thought he'd be the other way round.

I’m sorry I just don’t get why your brother doesn’t think homosexuality should be tolerated. Actually I can’t think of a single good reason to have this opinion. (Unless you use the “Cuz God says so!” card)


Even if you are a hard line Homophobic eugenicists, you should be happy that people with suboptimal sexual instincts do not reproduce like they used to in the time when it was expected of most men to marry and have children.

[Heraclitus]

But this makes for an ethical dilema, since they took the same risk. Why would you punish someone for being unlucky?