Since you're now asking exactly what Santorum suggested, are you letting him off the hook? Nah, I thought not. Neither am I.

As far as incest goes, I also don't understand why it is illegal. It's generally disgusting, but so are spandex shorts on anyone with a body fat percentage greater than about 13% for males or 20% for females.

But why ignore adultery and polygamy? Why are they illegal anywhere? Adultery can said to have a victim - the wronged spouse - but couldn't that be handled through the civil courts? Why is it a criminal act in some states?

What about polygamy? Does the fact that all current examples of this are generally perpetrated by creepy people taking advantage of creepy young girls or foreign women have anything to do with it? Because that might change if it were legal.

Personally, I'd still go with Samuel Clemens answer when he was asked by a Mormon friend to find anything in the Bible against polygamy: "No man can server two masters."

As a Christian, I can think of passages condoning polygamy and passages that aren't so hot on the idea. But even those are generally directed that those in positions of responsibilty (leadership), not the general Christian population. Adultery and incest are more expressly forbidden, but even incest has come into and out of favor over time throughout the Bible, depending on the extenuating circumstances. And if polygamy is allowed, it's pretty tough to commit adultery, isn't it?

Chalk me up as someone who is against incest, adultery and polygamy (I have to say that, my wife might read this), but wonders why the US criminal courts have any jurisdiction over such matters.

"Since you're now asking exactly what Santorum suggested, are you letting him off the hook?"

And that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately. The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we're seeing it in our society.

True that, Brian. It's nice to know that you aren't completely wrong about everything!

And yes, I'm teasing. It's been a long week, and while I'm finally making progress on a design for Blogcritics that might work within MSIE5 while not looking like roadkill in decent browsers, I'm still not there yet, so I'm trying to be careful not to take out my frustrations on others.

ha ha ha ha ha

Utah Sect Leader Criticizes Santorum

Help me out here, Brian. Where is Santorum sourced as saying about about beastiality or child-molestation? All of the articles I've read recently, including the hilarious one from Utah, stop short of that. By stopping short, they leave the only part of Santorum's comments that I find truly objectionable the privacy issue. As he has pointed out, in his own defense, even that is a common question. Too common, in my book.

So I still think he's a moron, and I hate the thought of him in the Senate, but there are plenty of morons in D.C. in both parties. Kick them all out!

Phillip,

Help me out here, Brian. Where is Santorum sourced as saying about about beastiality or child-molestation?

Gotcha, I thought I'd seen reference to it, I just couldn't remember where. Still, you're reaching here. After several times more clearly comparing "sodomy" with the aforementioned mild(ish) though provocative acts, he later, in a slightly different context, says:

In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.

The right to privacy is a right that was created in a law that set forth a (ban on) rights to limit individual passions. And I don't agree with that. So I would make the argument that with President, or Senator or Congressman or whoever Santorum, I would put it back to where it is, the democratic process. If New York doesn't want sodomy laws, if the people of New York want abortion, fine. I mean, I wouldn't agree with it, but that's their right. But I don't agree with the Supreme Court coming in.

As a little sister with three older brothers, I have to bring up one issue of incest not necessarily related to law.

It's a power thing. Incest is rarely fully consensual. The relationship between the parties would make that almost impossible.

That being said, I do think it is in the jurisdiciton of local state government,not federal.

Okay, I have to go throw up now.
ewww...

Phillip,

You are clearly wearing your "I must love all Republicans hat."

The pronoun "it's" obviously refers to "marriage."

I don't think there can be any reasonable doubt that the idea Santorum is trying to communicate, explicitly, not implicitly, is this:

Marriage is not these three things:

man on man
man on dog
man on child

Because marriage is "one thing": Man on woman.

He's not saying homosexuality is "one thing." He's saying marriage is one thing. And he's saying that he's not "picking on" homosexuality only, because he excludes a lot of other things from marriage, too. Such as bestiality and child molestation.

Do you really think he meant "homosexuality is one thing"? If so, what on Earth could he mean by that? It doesn't make any sense.

I don't think this is a matter of an interpretation that goes either way. It's clearly the only intepretation of what he said that makes sense. I think you really have to blur your eyes to think that "it's" can refer to anything but "marriage" in that paragraph. Or I guess you can put on your "I love all Republicans" glasses.

As far as the legal analysis goes, would you agree with this statement:

"It is okay for a government to create and enforce a law regulating private behavior, as long as it is a state government, not a federal government."

murphy,

Yeah, it is gross, I imagine even more so for someone with opposite-sex siblings.

Are you saying that the power relationship between, say, a 40-year-old brother and his 36-year-old sister is so out of balance that any sexual act between them would not be consensual? I'm not challenging that idea, I just wonder if that's what you're saying.

On Santorum: See, this is where an audio source would be nice. It took three tries with accents on different syllables before I finally read it the way you're suggesting. Having done so finally, yep, I can definitely see how that could be what he meant. Had I the time, I'd post audio of me reading those sentences both ways. Anyway, as I've said, it's an ignorant view, but the legal basis for his overall statements seems worthy of consideration. Er, and obviously it seems so to you as well, hence this post. So we're back to agreeing on this one, mostly.

Your revised question is interesting, because it has been a matter of some debate within my circles of family and friends for some time. My answer is that I think that there should have to be some commonly held compelling interest to the local jurisdiction. Sadly, this is vague enough to lead eventually to a local police state, but I'm not sure I can make it any more specific. In the end, all societies are derived from the consent of the governed (though obviously many times that "consent" can be based on fear or misinformation, a fact to which murphy alludes), and if enough people in an area decide it is against the law for someone to own a yellow car, that's what happens.

Of course, owning a car seems like a private behavior, but then one can argue that buying or selling such a car would be an act of commerce, which is different. Some better examples might be community compacts which require a homeowner to keep his yeard so and his house so because the community is concerned about property values. Or that prohibits more than X number of people per bedroom, ostensibly for the same reason. Now I hope that anybody can see that this seems an unreasonable restriction, since it presumes that all family groups of more than X people per room will necessarily act in such a way to bring down property values, which isn't necessarily so. But it's the "law" in many areas.

So it's a gray area. It all hinges on what constitutes a compelling interest, and many good and honest people will naturally disagree on that. Homeschooling - does society have a compelling interest? Some states say yes, some say no, and most are somewhere in between (which technically means "yes"). What about drug use? Some states or even cities would like to decriminalize the use of certain narcotics (an act of which I'm generally in favor, by the way), and I would be much more comfortable with that decision being made locally than the way it is handled now. (Speaking of reasons to be greatly peeved at Ashcroft, though in this case he's following well-established guidelines, just more zealously than some)

There are plenty of other examples, but I think my answer is probably clear enough. Let me know if not.

On incest: I saw an episode of ER once where these teenage siblings had committed incest during their time of trauma and grief after their mother's death (I think that was it), and their father found out because the pretty nurse talked about it when she shouldn't have. Granted, it's television, but there's one example in which power didn't seem to be a factor. Generally, though, I agree with Murphy that most incidents of anything sexual have primarily to do with power. Certainly sexual harrassment in the workplace is a reflection of power and control more than anything else.

Frankly, I've got a teenage sister, and I can't even imagine her as a nearly-adult person, with all that implies, let alone as an object of desire. Nothing personal, sis, I'm sure you're desirable to somebody, it's just hard for me to wrap my head around, so I'll stop trying.

So yeah, Murphy's probably right, but there are exceptions to everything, which is why one-size-fits-all laws should usually be better reasoned out than they are.

Now, Brian, these interesting comments keep taking me away from stuff I've got to get done, on Blogcritics.org's backend and otherwise. So stop it! 8^)

For a relatively well-reasoned argument on why even Christians should not (and mostly do not) support making every Biblical restriction into law, see Eugene Volokh.

I know, it's only circumstancially applicable to this post, but I couldn't remember where else we had this conversation about mixing Christianity and politics, so this'll have to do. 8^)

Phillip,

I suppose it is a gray area if one thinks that zoning laws and buttfucking laws are somehow in the same category.

The color of a house can be regulated without violating a privacy right because everyone in the neighborhood sees that house's exterior. The house's exterior is not the least bit private--it directly affects others, to the extent that they see it.

For this reason, I would fully support a law against public anal sex. Your property or not--you can't have sex on your front lawn. Go do it in private. But if the local community wants to follow you INSIDE your house and regulate your sexual behavior there, I would support a judge putting a stop to that.

I don't know what other protection there would be. And the right of homosexuals to bone away as much as they want however they want is important enough to protect, I think. Just looking at a gay person who is in jail for expressing his sexual desire and saying, "Hmm..too bad, I don't agree with that, but the local community DID make the law" isn't good enough.

Whatever value there might be in achieving some ideal state of separation between local communities and the federal judiciary is negated by the fact that some gay dude is sitting in jail only because he wanted to bone another guy up the butt in private.

Re: Ten Commandments. Volokh's argument is good, and I've always known that many, many Christians prefer a secular government to any hint of theocracy. I personally know lots of these Christians.

However, if you could go and convince the millions of Christians who most certainly wouldn't agree in this strict separation, I'd really appreciate it. They're the ones I'm worried about. Not all Christians. Those Christians--the dangerous ones.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure that the incest laws are a holdover from people realizing that many of the health problems they had were a result of inbreeding -- such as the hemophiliacs that ran rampant through the courts of Western Europe -- and wanting to prevent them in the future. Then they stay on the books because no one wants to come out as pro-incest and no one respectable is lobbying hard to get the laws changed. Then they're only used in reported abuse cases and to prevent intermarriage.

Brian - In #9, you stated that I must be wearing an "I love Republicans" hat to be able to hear anything other than your chosen interpretation of Santorum's comment regarding truly perverse acts.

I note that no less a Republican than Dan Savage - in an article entitled "G.O.P. Hypcorisy," no less - makes the same "mistake."

Oops!

Yeah, he made the same mistake. It isn't a hard mistake to make. I did at first. But once you actually think about that parapgraph, I don't think it's easy to retain that conclusion.

Explain the meaning of

"It is one thing."

I submit that you can't do it without gymnastics.

Whereas if "it" means "marriage," the entire paragraph makes sense, and has the bonus of being consistent with Santorum's views on marriage, and consistent with the Christian Right's tendency in general to frame every attack like this as a "defense of marriage."

In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.

In america we are not free,But only as free as they allow us to be.


Ban the laws!

Phillip,
I disagree with you vehemently! I had a body fat percentage of 11, and I STILL looked disgusting in spandex shorts!

Incest is rightfully illegal. Society has the right to draw lines and say "this behavior is never okay, is never appropriate or acceptable," and the only way to officially do this is through law. Incest is unhealthy physically and even more important, emotionally: immediate family members should have only one relationship with each family member, that of "family member," and to confuse that with sex and all the baggage attendant to such a relationship is insanity.

And this has nothing to do with equal rights or hereditary predispositions as we discuss so frequently here vis-a-vis gay rights, etc - an immediate family member is NEVER the "right one" for you. Period. No exceptions. Ever. Shut up.

But what does that have to do with how hot I don't look in biker shorts?

Bricklayer, we don't disagree at all. I concede that you look dreadful in biker shorts, and would at any body fat percentage. Moreover, I never said otherwise.

What I said was "It's generally disgusting, but so are spandex shorts on anyone with a body fat percentage greater than about 13% for males or 20% for females." I never even addressed the subject of people with body fat percentages under those levels, and it's clear that many of them are also disgusting, including you.

Nothing personal, of course! ;)

(Assuming the voice of Emily Latella) Oh, um, nevermind.

I think I'll dissapear now.

i just want to know one thing... does it count as incest for a girl to fuck her step brother?

It depends, Shayna? Are you hot?

No, seriously, the reason the taboo is functional in society is because of the potential for child abuse and poor boundaries. You can make an argument that adults can make better choices in this regard once everyone's a consenting adult, but it's still definitely a bad idea to keep it within the family (especially the primary/ nuclear family). Yes, the genetic thing is largely a myth, but there's clearly a social and cultural disadvantage (if you want to talk in anthropological terms) to endogamous rather than exogamous pairings.

I don't think prohibitions through the law are the answer to most issues and I'm not familiar with where the law currently stands. I would say that anything involving minors and children should definitely remain illegal, as should all such sex (whether incest or not). I'm also inclined to say consenting adults within the primary family unit should still also be disallowed since there's the inherent potential for coercion and abuse. And I think for cousins and step-sisters and the like (which I think is legal), move to West Virginia ... mazeltov.

That is all.

Many of society's laws reflect a history where law was created in reflection of morals and ethics, because the lawmakers judged it was their job to enforce moral codes on their society. What was thought to be immoral was then usually made illegal. Witness the histories of alcohol prohibition in the USA, prostitution, homosexuality, drugs. Many forms of tobacco advertising are illegal in Europe - in my opinion it is only a matter of time before tobacco itself is outlawed. Incest is an example of a morally originating law.

Some of these moral-based laws we may agree with, some of them we may not.

Surely the proper role of law in this context is to protect the weak and innocent members of society from abuse and/or exploitation, and NOT to prevent mature consenting adults from exercising their freedom of choice? The real question, it seems to me, is whether it is right for any society to impose moral-based laws on its adult and mature members?

I was having a conversation with someone the other day who insisted that while beastility ws illegal that incest was not between consenting adults. But every time I try to google this to find out statutes I get, well, you know what I get!

Can any of you kind folks help me out by giving me sites that cite laws prohibiting incest of any age?

Thank you.

Personaly, i feel although incest is wrong it shouldn't be a law because firstly barely anyone will do it becuase they think it is gross and those who do will know the health implications of doing it and so are unlikely to try and have children. Therefore, there is no need to make it illegal as it doesn't change anything.

WHY IS IT ILLEGAL?

Brian

Incest along with murder are the two things that are and have been taboo in all cultures through time. There are some perverted examples in Greek/Roman society but the pupolation thought the acts despicable.

Also again, marriage was instituted for the sake of propagating the species. We can argue all day but that is the reason it exists. Incest goes against the notion of a viable species as it is known to produce defects as you have mentioned. How many times have couples who thought that they couldn't concieve, found themselves pregnant. What would prevent related couples from screeming discrimination because they have to present data about their reproduction when non related people dont. Why couln't they say that they could do genetic testing on the embrio to make sure that it has no defects.

Also, if it become socially acceptable for brother and sister to engage in sexual activity, those who are growing up in house holds, who are not sterile, will be more inclined to indulge in sexual activity. Babies would result. Also teen boys with their raging hormones would be more apt to molest their younger sisters because the YUCK factor of incest would be removed.

What would prevent adult brothers and sisters from dating and producing offspring if the taboo is removed?

Every law exist because we get out of control.

Ummmm Santorum looks gay.

Is it me???

For all those folks who don't know the answer to this question: many years ago, I found myself on the wild and woolly, largely unsettled west coast of an island State off the coast of mainland Australia (I won't offend people by naming it).

It was there, in a very isolated small town, or what passed as a town, having a few houses, a shop and a petrol pump, that I realised all the jokes about the friendly inhabitants of this beautiful said island State having two heads were possibly once based on a kernel of truth.

You could feel the bad vibes from inside the car. Incest and in-breeding is no joke. And serious health problems are the least of the issues.

Mind you, six fingers are very handy if you're a banjo player.

My ex was into incense. Never liked the smell. Like being in a head shop ya know. Peace.

"Mind you, six fingers are very handy if you're a banjo player."

If the banjo has only five strings, what are you going to use that extra digit for, Stan??

by the frigid nipples of sweet Persephone, can we puh-leeEEEEeeEEEEeeeezzze lock these threads or something that keep getting spammed over and over and flood ongoing topics from the fresh comments page?

I'm guessing blocking IPs isn't possible, but at least lock these ancient dead threads...the spam-bot keeps hitting the same ones over and over and over and over and over and over...

thanks in advance

Second the motion...

Incest is illegal because if it weren't, there'd be a lot of gibberers running around like Erick Norton. Being able to spell Eric properly should be a pre-requisite for being allowed to remain in the gene pool.

Lots of things are illegal that should be legal. Incest is just one of them.

Let's start a list!

1. Drugs - In a "free country", people should be FREE to use drugs. Don't piss on my leg & tell me it's raining please.

2. Prostitution - The oldest profession should DEFINITELY be legal.

3. Anal Sex - How can a "free country" tell me where I can put it? If my wife agrees, it should be legal!!

I'm sure there are many more...

By the way, read the Treaty of Tripoli (signed by George Washington and many founding fathers) and you will see that THE USA IS NOT A CHRISTIAN NATION... so get out with your xian laws.

This might have been said already, but genetically speaking, incest is a slow form of suicide. Read up on your history of various European royal families and you'll see what I'm talking about.

If you intermarry, the first generation or two might actually show some enhanced genetic characteristics, after that, it's all down hill from there.

Negative traits appear and you see increased incidences of retardation and other genetic abnormalities until the whole line ceases to exist.

Oh yeah, the whole idea is yucky and creepy too.

My two cents. :-)

David

It is outlawed, I believe, because sex is the prefered method of procreation for the overwhelming majority. Whilst we may enjoy sex, the fundamental purpose of sex is to procreate, and it is for this reason (I assume) that incest is illegal. Demented children don't do the economy nay good.

your question seems to be rhetorical

If man on child is wrong why have the catholic clergy not only supported it but practiced it for centuries, including in current times. Rather than admit any wrongdoing they first move the priest from parrish to parrish in the hopes it will just go away. only after years and a lot of legal work is anything done, and the cases settled rather than fought.
anything between consenting adults that you cannot stop without 24 hour in HOME surveillance should be legal. Congrats to the Nazi's that would have your sex life under their strict rules. first it starts with who you can be with. then what you can do. finally how long you can do it for. Then if you screw up Warren Jeffs is telling you your moth... i mean wife has to go sleep with another man.
In these days we need more homosexuals, smokers, people who don't wear seatbelts, and all those other things that either don't make babies or kill the person doing it. why you ask. go down to your local unemployment office. then go to a local homeless shelter. then tell me we need more people. people are for this or anti that, but they don't fucking look at the bigger picture. only their small minds going "duhh, i think the world should be this way, and i'll kill to have it"
frankly if you have two relatives that want to fuck their brains out, the real issue is how far will you go to stop it.
George W Bush would be more than happy to install the fucking camera's in your home to make sure you aren't beating off (to or not to the picture of your hot Aunt). hell, from the paperwork he'll do it just for the hell out of it. (to alabama) maybe your vibrators are actually al-quida weapons of mass distruction and the reason Bush never could locate them is he won't admit that its all the first lady gets. (plausable deniability in government) of course there is that anti-bestiality thing, well, and you seen his wife... what a dog.
look what happened when someone actually suggested teaching masturbation as a SAFE SEX measure.
Homosexuals should recieve Darwin Award Plaques.
not for being idiots but by reducing the population.
fuck we do it for dogs and cats. the same arguments work for people.
homeless stray people breeding uncontrolably with no resources dying in the streets. please have your young neighbor couples spayed and nuetered today.
tonight my wife is going to suck my dick then take it up the ass. if you want to come in and stop her i'll be happy to pull out the gun and improve the gene pool.
good night.

sounds like someone wants to jump his sister