So why? I know that in terms of biology and evolution, incest is very ineffective because it allows genetic diseases to spread throughout generations and doesn’t provide the mixture of genes necessary to improve a species’ genome; I also know that many religions banned incest. But this cannot be an argument to formally outlaw it, since
(1) in a modern secular nation where church and state are seperate religious moral should not affect the legislation,
(2) the question of a family’s genome is none of the state’s business,
(3) incest has already been banned since a time where evolution was not yet acknowledged.
Doesn’t the idea of freedom also mean that two individuals are allowed to have intercourse if they want to, no matter whether they are related or not?
Similar question: Why do some nations, the UK in particular, still outlaw suicide?
[sup]Note: I do not support incest or suicide; I’d just like to know how the state legitimates such heavy restrictions of an individual’s rights.[/sup]
well… this may not be of any considerable relavance…but the UK still does have an establish religion I do believe (though it could have been seperated years ago and i’ll look stupid)… so they could still have reason to base legislation on church teachings
Wait! … Incest is not illegal in the US? I know that relatives as close as first cousins may not get married nor may brother and sister. There have even been questions about step brothers and step sisters wedding each other, even though not related. There was something in the news awhile back about a fugative guy who left with his oldest daughter and for a few years, they posed as man and wife, and when the police caught him, the then adult daughter had a baby. Presumably by him, though she refused to tell and declined to say anything that would incriminate her father. From my understanding, he was never charged with incest and she was not forced to submit the child to DNA testing.
I think we’re saying that incest is simply sex between two blood related people, not necessarily marriage. Unfortunately, all kinds of marriages are illegal. Who you have sex with is not.
Many people would argue that you are not describing the USA with that statement. Congress attempts to, and sometimes succeeds in, legislating morality issues. If you don’t think that is true, go try exchanging money for sex.
Things that offend the morality of a sufficient number of people can, through our legal process, be made illegal.
However there seems to be a law in many states of the U.S that opposite-sex siblings may not sleep in the same room(even on different beds),regardless of their age,whether 2 or 12 or 42.That’s the most ridiculous law I’ve heard of.Are all children sex perverts like the lawmakers think(how many are anyway?)?Do all parents have the money to provide two rooms for two small children?That’s such a waste of space and money.
So much for freedom and democracy.
I’m fairly sure incest is indeed illegal in the US (probably varies from state to state). There was an interesting article in Esquire a few years back about a brother and sister who got married (they met for the first time when they were 18 or so), had kids, then were sent to jail. The judge made some kind of statement that it was having the kids that really made them enforce the law.
I managed to find the names of the brother/sister couple in the Esquire article: Allen and Patty Muth. I haven’t been able to find a good web article about them yet, though.
I’d venture a guess that most countries established their basic legal system long before the trend before the separation of church and state became common. Until not too long ago in England, the Head of State was also the Head of the Church (both are only mostly ceremonial now).
At some point in the Bible - don’t ask me where - I’m sure there’s a point that says that “a man shouldn’t lay down with his sister.” Or something like that.
A lot of laws are based on religious ones; some of which make basic sense, if nothing else. I’d imagine that in England, the U.S., Canada and other primarily Christian countries, the incest law is based on Bible law, and kept on the books up to now mainly 'cause it’s a good idea. Until very recently homosexuality was illegal for the very same reasons, ‘cause the Bible says it’s immoral, and most lawmakers’ morals were influenced by the major tract of their religion.
I skimmed the article again; they were east sent to seperate MAXIMUM SECURITY prisons, charged under a 1849 Wisconsin statute that criminalized incest. And this was AFTER Patty had agreed to submit to sterilation, so there was no chance of more kids being produced.
I quote the judge:
Clearly, this is a case where the state simply wanted to stop these two people from having sex, even though no more kids would have produced.
It DOES vary from state to state, and one of the sillier aspects of it is that some states recognize in-law relationships as bars to marriage. I know of a case where a pair of sisters married a pair of brothers - in some states the second marriage would have been illegal because a woman marrying her brother-in-law would have been “incest”. Never mind that the sitiuation imposes no genetic barriers on the union.
(I also know of a case where a pair of sisters married a father and son. The weird part is that neither marriage was a very wide gap in terms of age - the sisters were over 10 years apart. In-law relationships had to be very entertaining in that family.)
On the other hand, states differ on the legality of cousins marrying. Offspring from first cousins is NOT a good idea genetically - you’re 1/8 related to a first cousin, which is too close, but different states draw the line differently. I know of none of them that state the law in degree-of-relatedness terms, which is what would actually make sense.
I ran across this page for people romantically involved with their cousins:
They claim to list 26 states that allow marriage of first cousins. Unfortunately, you have to register to follow that link.
Being perfectly pragmatic, it would seem reasonable to allow marriage as a legal contract between any individuals, under the same rationale that gay marriage makes sense[sup]1[/sup], with a proviso that steps must be taken to prevent children if the parties are too closely related in genetic terms. Yes, you may marry your sister if you are so inclined, but she will get her tubes tied or you will get a vasectomy. It would never happen of course - the fulmination by the Christian right over such a proposal would be entertaining to say the least.
[sup]1[/sup] - that would be that marriage is a legal contract, and has such things as spousal benefits wrapped up with it. Personally, I would like to resolve the issue by separating the concept of marriage entirely from the legal contract / beneficiary concept. But we are certainly moving over into GD territory here.
Well, that depends on what you mean by “evolution”. People have been selectively breeding domesticated animals for thousands of years. While they may not have understood evolution or genetics the way that we do today, they certainly knew that the health and overall fitness of the offspring (be it human or another animal) depended largely on who the parents were. It doesn’t take a Darwin to realize that if the offspring of bloodline X tend to suffer from disease Y then it’s a very bad idea for two individuals from bloodline X to mate with one another. Ancient people could observe the ill effects of inbreeding even if they didn’t fully understand the science behind it.
IIRC in most states/territories of the US incest in and of itself, regardless of age, is illegal, though in many of them the charge is combined with that of sexual contact with a minor, if the case merits it, in order to provide the appropriate harshness of punishment.
Here where I live the statute applies to any intercourse between ascendants & descendants, or between collateral relatives up to the third degree of consanguinity (sibs, half-sibs, uncle-niece, aunt-nephew) – whether the familial link be natural, adoptive or foster, and extending to step-relatives and “legal guardians”; it’s a felony with no statute of limitations, and an adult/minor age difference simply adds Stat Rape and Child Abuse to the charges against the adult.
Inferred from the statute’s inclusion of non-blood-related “family units” is ANOTHER, non-biological reason why incest is considered illegal by a society: its potential for severe damage to the integrity of family relations. In societies where the stability of the community depends on clear lines of intra- and inter- familial loyalty, authority, succession and property transfer [sub] [1] [/sub] , that is serious business. So happens the societies our Western Civilization derives from were like that.
It’s very similar to the basis for thinking it’s a really bad idea to carry on an affair between commanding officer/enlisted subordinate, professor/student, counselor/counselee – Will you not send a daughter to college in order to keep your lover close by? Will you maneuver to have your husband leave all his cash to the son that’s more of a mama’s boy than anyone imagines? Will you use your blood relation as leverage to demand that your sibling remain sexually involved with you even after marrying someone else? – only that, since you can’t resign from your family, and that is the basic social unit, it’s elevated to the status of a serious offense.
[sub][1]As in, if someone is simultaneously the late Yoog Son of Yoog’s sister and daughter, as which does she participate in his estate? And can their oldest son speak for the family before the Tribal council, or should Yoog’s equally-bastard-but-non-incestuous other son? [/sub]
I’ve never understood the argument that the incest taboo is related to livestock. Yes, as Lamia pointed out, you do see some evidence of the negative results of inbreeding in livestock, but at the same time, people use selective inbreeding to bolster positive traits in their animals as well. I don’t understand why human beings would develop a moral absolute against human incest based on results of animal inbreeding, which are sometimes good and sometimes bad. If our ideas about incest* came from watching animals, our society’s response might be more “hmmm, sometimes that doesn’t work out very well” as opposed to “EWWWW.” Is there something I’m missing?
*with the understanding that various cultures define incest differently
Guinastasia, since you’re in the know on European dynasties, what’s the closest blood relationship you know of between two people who married and had children? Where the royal marriages between cousins and what-not considered an exception to the social standards at the time, or was there one set of rules for royalty, and another for us common folk?
And of course, after I hit submit, I realized that those two things amount to the same thing. What I meant was, if the queen could marry her cousin, could the innkeeper’s daughter do the same thing, or would she be run out of town on a rail?
First cousins, mostly. Sometimes, said first cousins were doubly related. For example, Queen Victoria married her first cousin, Prince Albert. Four of their grandchildren married each other-
Prince Henry of Prussia married Princess Irene of Hesse.
Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg married Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse. (BTW, Irene and Ernst were brother and sister and their youngest surviving sister, Alix, was Tsarina Alexandra).
The first marriage was a good one, but the 2nd one was arranged by Queen Victoria and ended in divorce shortly after her death.
In the 18th century, there was talk of marrying Prince Peter of Holstein to his aunt, Princess Yelizaveta of Russia, daughter of Peter the Great. Nothing came of it-Peter would be married to Princess Sophie of Anholt-Zerbst, and become Grand Duchess Catherine-later Catherine the Great.
I do believe that the Egyptian royals used to marry their siblings-Cleopatra did, I believe.