This is going to be a fun one.
So here are the facts:
I commented on a news article about a mother and adult son charged with incest (and adultery as well for her.) This is what I said:
Someone responded to me and I replied before I realized my original comment was removed for being inappropriate. Then I added the edit when I saw.
The next day I discovered I’d been banned from that community for “pro-incest comments” and several others I don’t think I’ve ever been in for rule 4 violations. The orignal post was removed.
You can see those here:
Site rule 4 is: Usernames or posts/comments containing transphobia, homophobia, sexism, racism, ableism, zionism, anti-veganism, or trivializing COVID. No self-described or obvious fascists, conservatives, or reactionaries.
My comments had none of those things. I’d even go so far as to say my banning was reactionary.
Now, I’m not defending incest, especially not for myself. My problem is with puritanical laws interfering with the private sex lives of people. In my original comment I stated that grooming was a separate issue and should be dealt with, but that there is nothing inherently wrong with incest. That is, enthusiastic consensual sex between capable adults.
I know someone will bring up the Hapsburgs, so yes, children of incest should be avoided.
I said this below, but i think it requires visibility… you people are just missing the actual problem:
just so you fully understand…
incest cannot be about ‘consenting adults’ because those adults psychology are incredibly intertwined, and the decision to perform the incest cannot be held separately form those relationships.
its a power dynamic tangential to rape, and the only people ‘pro-consenting-adult incest’ are completely ignorant of the actual issue.
there is no such thing as a ‘healthy’ sexual relationship with regards to incest, hence its illegality.
I disagree. Rape, coersion and sexual interference are already crimes (in many places) and ethically wrong (almost anywhere.)
As someone who doesn’t know most of my family, and assume most everyone didn’t grow up with their extended family, I wouldn’t say familial relationships are more psychologically intertwined than any other. It’s a long walk to assume there’s such an unfair power imbalance in incestuous relationships as to make incest tangential to rape.
If you can provide a way to quantify the extent to which 2 people are “psychologically intertwined”, I’ll consider this, but at the moment, it doesn’t sound credible.
Not every incestuous relationship fits that description. Two half-siblings of the same sperm donor don’t share any of the problematic psychologies you describe.
I just described one. Any number can exist. Criminalizing the parties in the situation I described is fundamentally unjust.
The problem you’re describing isn’t actually one of incest. The problem you are describing is one of a power imbalance significant enough to justify stripping one of the parties of their personal agency with regard to consent. While the scenario you describe does call for the state to so deeply tread upon the individuality of this person, it is not their biological kinship that justifies this intrusion. It is the power imbalance between them; the exploitation by the social superior against a subjugated inferior.
If the power dynamic is clear (which includes parent-child cases like what OP was talking about, I’m in agreement with you there), then why should the law specifically care that the people involved are relatives, wouldn’t more general laws about coercion, grooming, or abusing positions of authority be sufficient to make that a crime? (And if they aren’t, shouldn’t they be?)
If the power dynamic is not clear, like if both people involved are of similar age and there’s not some other clear marker of who has power over the other like financial dependency or some kind of caretaker relationship (not “if there is no power dynamic”, just if it’s ambiguous enough to an outsider that there’s a significant risk of an outsider like a judge or jury or cop getting the dynamic wrong), then doesn’t having a specific law about incest risk punishing the wrong side a significant percentage of the time, or create a situation where a victim is afraid to come forward or can be threatened into more abuse, because they fear the penalty being applied to them as well if the law isn’t convinced that they weren’t the person with the power in their situation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_incest
Incest between people who know beforehand is absolutely wrong and pretty much guaranteed to not meet the criteria for consent, but it is a broad topic that isn’t as simple as parent/child.
o0o0 i see, you want the actual, common incest to be legal because of an edge-case easily handled by judges.
got it, youre an incest cheerleader… for some reason.
A judge can’t just rule someone gets a free pass when something is illegal because they didn’t know. That isn’t how law works.
The law could conceiveably be written to exclude those cases, but anyone trying to include that would have people like you claiming they are pro incest for pointing out exceptions.
my original point was grand jury which absolutely decides whether charges are applied and prosecution attempted
either way, still not sure why anyone would think that edge case is a reason for you all to want incest to be legal… sure are strainin’ to do some explainin as they say.
You said judges, not grand juries. You also assume I want the opposite of what I wrote.
Not wanting something to be illegal is not the same as being in favor of it. There are lots of things that I am fine with being legal that I am opposed to because I think making them illegal would be a huge negative compared to addressing it through social pressure.
There’s been a few studies on positive incest cases, not sure if you’ve ever heard about the Reddit story of the guy with two broken arms that evolved into an incestous relationship with his mom - They’ve been part of one of such studies
That Reddit story has to be a joke lol
It’s unfortunately verified through doctors that did research on their experience