Not Everything You Don’t Like Should Be Illegal

Ishmael N. Daro thinks it is fine for everyone to tell consanguineous lovers they are bad for finding happiness with each other, but even he, despite his revulsion, thinks there shouldn’t be a law against consanguineous sex.

After all, if incest occurs between an adult and a minor there are already laws in place against pedophilia and sexual abuse. Two consenting adults, however, should be free to do whatever they like in the bedroom, even if their relation makes us squeamish.

Thanks for this admission.

Around the world, half a dozen countries have no laws against consensual incest between adults including France, Spain and Russia. These countries are not suffering from moral collapse any more than Canada and the U.S.

Sometimes, certain sexual practices inspire such revulsion they bring the full force of the law upon those who take part in them. Interracial marriage was once seen as abhorrent, but today you would be hard-pressed to find any serious opposition to such a union. Homosexuality, too, used to inspire violent opposition - and arguably still does - but most people accept it as part of mainstream society.

We are making progress. Let’s keep tearing down the walls of hate that prevent full marriage equality.

Lawrence Should Protect Epstein

Matthew J. Franck is bothered by David Epstein’s love life and the reaction of the public to the filing of criminal charges against Epstein. He especially considers William Saletan’s reaction. Franck appears to be not only against the right of consenting adults to consanguineous love and sex, but against gay sex and love. But even if he is antiequality, he makes some good points later in his essay.

Liberal writers have a startling inability to articulate what’s wrong with a prominent professor’s incestuous relationship with his daughter.

So do writers who aren’t “liberal,” because we don’t know the internal dymanics of the relationship in question well enough to be able to say something is wrong with it. We can look at a unrelated heterosexual couple who are the same age, and see that there’s something wrong with the relationship if one is abusing the other in front of our eyes. For all we know, David Epstein and his daughter have a very loving, happy relationship.

It is almost equally disturbing that a legal argument for a “right” to engage in adult, consensual incest stands on surprisingly firm footing, thanks to precedents the United States Supreme Court has already established in other cases on the “autonomy of the person” under our Constitution.

It is disturbing that someone should be able to make decisions about her own body and with whom she shares it?

So powerful is the contemporary opinion that “consenting adults” may engage, in private, in any acts that commit no “harm” (narrowly understood in almost purely physical terms) to the parties in question or to others, that some observers have merely shrugged indifferently at the Epstein case, while others have striven to find grounds for condemning such incestuous acts but finally confessed their failure to find them.

I can find so much material from men and women, simply by searching online, who were in heterosexual, supposedly monogamous relationships with someone who wasn’t a close a relative who claim they were, and seem to have been, deeply hurt as a result of those relationships. Some go through years of therapy as a result. But we don’t criminalize these relationships, and I doubt Franck would say all such relationships are morally wrong.

Franck cites C.S. Lewis’ book The Four Loves.

Lewis’s four forms of love are affection (the Greek storgē), friendship (philia), sexual or romantic love (eros), and charity or Christian love (agapē). Here we may stick to the first three—the “natural loves,” Lewis calls them—and observe that they are not so much variations of one thing as different species of love. Each has its own integrity, and is in an important way constitutive of human happiness. Some overlap among or progression through the various loves is possible, of course. Married couples, for instance, may begin as friends, become lovers, and finally find their relationship cemented in bonds of affection, that “humblest love” that as often as not involves a great deal of “taking for granted.”

But while such overlap is appropriate in some instances, in others it is inappropriate—indeed, it can be an outrage to mix loves or for one to intrude upon another.

Even if we pretend that Lewis’ book constitutes the basis for our laws, There is no reason why we should be certain overlap is not appropriate in the relationship between Epstein and his daughter, nor reason that it should be illegal.

Introduce the element of eros, however, and affection is not reinforced; it is destroyed, and replaced by something unnatural to the relationship in its proper sense.

There’s that “sex is destructive” idea again. Maybe these guys are doing it wrong.

He continues, bemoaning the Supreme Court’s actions in Lawrence v. Texas, rightly noting that the decision should invalidate laws against poly and consanguineous relationships in addition to protecting the right to same-sex relationships.

In its 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, invalidating laws against homosexual sodomy, the Court referred to “an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.”

He includes a quote from Justice Anthony Kennedy. Notice how this could be written of the Epstein case, if you replace “homosexual” with “consanguineous”…

The present case does not involve minors. It does not involve persons who might be injured or coerced or who are situated in relationships where consent might not easily be refused. It does not involve public conduct or prostitution. It does not involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter. The case does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other, engaged in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle. The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government.

So why is Epstein facing charges? Franck gets it right when he says…

As I had occasion to write several years ago in the context of another case of incest, if this is sound constitutional reasoning about the “liberty” protected by the due process clause, then it is as sound for the invalidation of incest laws as it is for the invalidation of sodomy laws.

He returns to Saletan…

What we must notice is that Saletan’s strictures against incest rest on moral arguments of a kind that the Supreme Court has already rejected in the Lawrence case.

And if Saletan or anyone else wants to live that way, they are free to do so, but demanding others do so is another matter. More and more people, when they think through it, realize that not only decriminalization, but full marriage equality makes sense.

Consanguineous Sex Leads to Chaos?

Concerned about what David Epstein was doing in private with another consenting adult, this blogger tries to convince us that the freedom to consanguineous love and sex will lead to chaos. He cites Thomas Aquinas, so I was expecting something deep. But maybe something was lost in translation?

In the Summa Theologica (II-II, Q. 154, A. 9), Thomas Aquinas gives four reasons why incest is contrary to reason. First, “because man naturally owes a certain respect to his parents and therefore to his other blood relations”; this respect can no longer exist once the relationship becomes incestuous.

You can’t respect someone with whom you are having sex? That doesn’t bode well for marriage or any relationship at all, does it? I wonder if this blogger is in a relationship, and how the other person feels about that?

Second, since blood relations “live in close touch with one another... opportunities of venereal intercourse would be very frequent and thus men's minds would be enervated by lust.”

Oh no, they might have sex a lot? Men (and quite a few women) think about sex all of the time, no matter where they are.

Third, by marrying someone to whom one is not related, one thereby gains friendships with one's wife's kin; this would be frustrated if one did not marry outside one's family.

I have many friends outside of my family to whom I’m neither married nor married to a relative of theirs.

And fourth, courtesy of Aristotle, a man will have a liking for his kinswoman; it is not good for this affection to become too ardent, which would occur if he had sexual relations with her.

It isn’t good to care about your relatives so much? These objections make it sound like sex is a horrible experience. I have to wonder if those who oppose equality are frustrated.

Moreover the bond between a husband and wife is substantially different from that formed between mother and son or father and daughter. Incest irrevocably distorts this bond, to the detriment of the family, and, by extension, society.

This is like saying best friends should never get married, because it would distort the friendship. When people are functioning socially in their biological roles, sex would create an additional bond. For some who are not functioning socially in those roles (as is often the case when someone was adopted and raised by loving parents, and he later meets his birth mother), that bond may not exist in the first place.

What have we learned? Sex is disrespectful and a chore. You can only make friends through marriage. You should not care about your family members so much. Do not have more than one dimension to your relationships. Funny, but that all sounds like it is much more likely to create chaos than two adults having the freedom to be happy together.

It isn’t like those of us who want full marriage equality insist that everyone should enjoy consanguineous sex. We simply want those who do to have the same freedom as anyone else; to be able to love the person(s) they do without being prosecuted or denied equality.

An Ally For the Freedom to Polygamous Marriage

I’ve been meaning to get around at looking at how TLC’s “Sister Wives” show has been received. I’m not doing that yet. However, the show and the legal fallout did prompt this write-up by Sara on the feminist blog Silence is Betrayal.

While I understand the legal reasons for differentiating between relationships and common law marriages (for example, a common law partner can seek spousal support), I was upset that the investigation could lead to the prosecution of freely consenting adults. All five were over the age of 18 and each consented to enter into this kind of relationship. With so many larger issues affecting society, why should the State care about what happens between consenting adults? By maintaining the ban on polygamous marriage, we are continuing to force these families to be closeted and to leave non-legally married spouses without important rights and protections that come with marriage.

Bring people out of the shadows. This will bring more protection to those who are being abused, and more people will see that most are not being being abused, but having a warm family life.

For the majority of states, a marriage license can be given to any male and female couple over the age of 18.

Almost true, but not quite. Some states prevent first cousins and any relatives closer than that from marrying. Virtually all states prevent all closer relatives from marrying, and most of them even prosecute them for having consensual sex. But I understand the focus of the write-up is on poly.

There have previously been sodomy laws and even adultery laws used to prosecute the behavior of consenting adults, but over time we've matured to see these as personal matters and not matters for the State to intervene on. So why can't we extend that to all sexual minorities?

We can and we should.

Until then, the State should stop playing morality police. Utah and other states should leave alone what consenting adults choose to do and focus their time and money on more important issues. There are an estimated 38,000 fundamentalist Mormon polygynist marriages currently in Utah today, many who are closeted and live in fear of being outed. We don't have to necessarily like these kinds of relationships or choose to enter into one ourselves, but we should let them live freely.

I urge you to read the whole write-up. It displays clarity and intelligence that is so rare in today’s discussion of marriage.

Brothers and Sisters

Someone asked on Yahoo Answers about consanguineous sex or love between brother and sister.

After reading some about brother and sister incest, I don't get it.....
I mean why is it illegal and gross?

It is illegal because some people have tried to control the sexuality of other people. Some people think it is gross, other people don’t. Some people are grossed out by the idea of various sexual realties.

But why is it not gross when it is boyXgirl?
What is the differnece?Blood?Chiledren?
In my opinion nothing is diffenrent except for the fact the children won't be healthy.....but maybe they won't have childeren?

The asker is correct in that sex and childbearing are two distinct things. We have childbearing without sex, we have sex without childbearing. But the asker makes an error in asserting as fact “the children won’t be healthy.” As with all births, there is some possibility of birth defects. If both siblings carry the same genetic problem, just as if both unrelated partners carry the same genetic problem, there is an increased possibility of that causing a birth defect in any offspring of the union. However, healthy children have been born to siblings couples.

Count Zander…

In a democratic society, most laws are reflections of public opinion. A lot of people consider incest to be disgusting.

A lot of people consider intergenerational (adult) relationships to be disgusting. A lot of people consider interracial relationships to be disgusting. A lot of people consider same-sex relationships to be disgusting. We don’t put rights up to a vote by majority. A majority voted for Prop H8, after all.

WyattsMommy…

you are sick.

Your bigotry and prejudice are showing. He is just asking a question.

The always informative Natalie Underwood checked in…

A scientist by the name of Westermarck discovered an instinct in human beings that causes them to avoid sex with anyone they lived with as a young child - whether they were actually relatives or not. That is why so many people feel a strong revulsion towards the idea of incest. It is not rejection based on reason or thought. It is a visceral,subconscious reaction.

It isn’t based on reason or thought.

The reason there are laws against incest is because some people do not have that instinct, and want to have sex with their family. Most people do have the instinct, and were disgusted by the idea, and people tend to legislate their own prejudices.

And we shoud tear down laws based on prejudice.

However, there are several countries where it is not against the law, because adult consensual incest is not harming anyone, and it is difficult to prove in court. So they save their resources for fighting child sexual abuse incest instead.

In Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Luxembourg, Turkey, Russia, India, Brazil, Israel and Japan, adult consensual incest is not a crime.

Rhode Island repealed its criminal incest statute in 1989, Ohio only targets parental figures, and New Jersey does not apply any penalties for incest to anyone over the age of 18.

I would very much welcome Natalie as a contributor this this blog. She is always so informative.

The law should not prevent marriage equality for a brother and sister.

One Benefit of Consanguineous Sex

Findings of a study published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology indicate a correlation among animals between consanguineous sex and a reduction in sexual violence.

As always, what is observed in some animals may or may not be observed in other animals, including human beings.

Changes Proposed to Laws in Ireland

Ireland may lower the age of consent, but bring the sentencing against women who commit “incest” up to the level that applies to men. I wish “incest” would be defined in the article, even if not in the law. As I have consitently maintained, there is a big difference between child abuse and sex between consenting adults.

THE GOVERNMENT will publish new proposals to lower the age of consent to 16 years, down from the current age of 17, early in the new year.

I neither support nor oppose this. Generally, I support the age of consent being no higher than 18. I do not think lowering the age of consent under 16 is a good idea. I also don’t think teenagers who are close in age to one another should be prosecuted for consensual sex.

It also proposes raising the maximum sentence for women who commit incest to life, up from the current seven-year maximum sentence, which was recently imposed on a mother of six.

The sentencing standards for convictions of child molestation or child rape or statutory rape should be the same regardless of genders. Consensual sex between adults should not be a crime.

The Incest News blog also picked up this story.

Consanguineous Lovers in Movies

Roger Nackerman, who is apparently not a fan of consanguineous sex and love, came up with a list of what is called “13 Steamiest Incestuous Relationships In Film” anyway. Some of them are spoilers, so don’t click the link or read the rest of this entry if you don’t want ant spoilers.

If these really are the steamiest, then this highlights the lack of portrayals of these relationships in the general media. What I would very much like to see is a serious major studio or accomplished independent production company develop a respectable movie, perhaps one involving Genetic Sexual Attraction, in which two people for whom we can root fall in love and make a life together. The conflict could be in accepting themselves and each other, and especially in dealing with the hostility, prejudice, and persecution of those around them and the law.

An Inconsistency in the Law?

This blogger, who is no friend of marriage equality, had an interest in Will Saletan’s writing on the David Epstein case.

Hey Will, can you do an article on the procreation rights of fathers and daughters, as opposed to the naked/orgasm/screwing rights? (Well, perhaps you could look at those three separately too, since they are rather different.) For instance, would it be a crime for a daughter to impregnate herself with a vial of her father's sperm? Is it something we have to allow a father and daughter to do, if they wants to?

If I recall correctly, many states do not outlaw this, and it was used as a defense in at least one case in which in which a woman (or perhaps girl) was pregnant, perhaps by a stepfather. Pregnancy was no proof that they had actually had sex, and the laws were against the sexual contact, not conceiving together. Any state that does not have a law against two people conceiving together should not be able to use the “inbreeding causes birth defects” argument to keep consensual consanguineous sex illegal.

Why Monogamy and Not Polyamory?

guitarpickup asked "Why are you monogamous and/or opposed to polyamory?" What followed was quite an interesting discussion. Go check it out.

Here are some things I noticed...

1. People cite a dislike of a certain thing, but that thing also happens in monogamous relationships, or relationships that are thought by one partner to be monogamous.

2. Some people admit their monogamy was due to jealousy or not wanting to share.

3. Some people say they aren't against exploring polyamory, but they know their current partner wouldn't stay with them if they did.

I am monogamous because my wife prefers it.

I am not opposed to polyamory. It rarely works to everyone's satisfaction, but I see no reason why people shouldn't be allowed to try.

Thank you, ally.

It is an interesting discussion.

The law should allow people to make their own choices, whether living alone, celibate, monogamous, polyamorous, or polygamous, or whatever. They shouldn't have to justify it to others. Just because I support the polygmous freedom to marry does not mean I'm against monogamy; no more than my support for the freedom to same-sex marriage means I'm against heterosexual marriage.

Mind Your Own

Nadia D. Gaffar wrote to the Calgary Herald...

When I heard that 84-year-old Hugh Hefner was getting married again to a 24-year-old, my instinctive reaction was yuck!

That's fine; she was not asked to marry either of them. Nobody has to like their choices, but they should be legal and they are. So should other marital choices. Say what you will about the 84-year-old or the 24-year-old and their decision, but it should not be illegal. Nor should this intergenerational marriage.

I guess it should not surprise me that men are still trying to legally have and justify multiple female partners. Ever heard of Bountiful, B.C.? Wonder what the reaction would have been if a woman had written that letter and suggested females have multiple partners "as long as she can be legally allowed to look after and be able to afford it and do material justice to them"?

Women should be able to have multiple husbands, or wives, or husbands and wives. What's wrong with people having the freedom to marry? Why does this person feel a need to speak out against the marital choices of others? I wonder what her relationship choices have been?

An Explanation of Why Islam Allows Polygyny

Bella Humaira posted an explanation as to why Islam allows polygyny, but not polyandry.

As a reminder, I support full marriage equality under the law, meaning that any adult, regardless of gender, should be able to marry any consenting adult persons(s), regardless of gender. It is interesting, though, to get different perspectives. Certainly, if everyone is consenting, I have no objection to a man marrying four women and I certainly don't think it should be illegal.