Here Comes Incest?

So says Jeff Jacoby. I'm skeptical - not because the right to incest doesn't arguably follow from the logic of gay marriage, as Jacoby says, but because I think the demand for marrying one's sister is far too low to overcome the "ick" factor involved. The gay population is small, but not that small - even at 2-4 percent of the American population, it's large enough to create both a mass constituency for gay marriage and a still-larger percentage of Americans who count homosexuals as their friends and neighbors, and understandably wish them happiness as a result. Whereas even if the incest taboo begins to fray, I think the number of would-be Ptolemies and Cleopatras is so vanishingly small that Americans - including Supreme Court Justices - will never have much of an incentive to put the logic of Lawrence v. Texas ahead of their repugnance.

Moreover, the case for gay marriage appeals to Americans' sense of fairness in a way that the argument for incest doesn't. If gays can't (or shouldn't) marry straights, the pro-gay wedlock argument runs, then they deserve to marry someone. Whereas a straight guy who wants to marry his sister isn't just asking for the right to marry the kind of person he's attracted to - he's asking for the right to marry a specific person, and that's more easily refused.

Comments

Personally, I think that incest will follow gay marriage just as gay marriage followed limited civil unions, in spite of advocates claims otherwise in the 80's and 90's.

As people become more inured to “odd couplings” a state of fatigue will overtake the population just as it has regarding gay marriage. People will use the inevitable “if they love each other, how could it be wrong?” followed by “whom are we to judge? I engaged in premarital sex” or other such relativistic rubbish.

Inevitably, there will be backlash to this from the more conservative quarters, but it will once again be reviled as “unenlightened” and “judgmental”. I fear I will live long enough to see most sexual mores flushed down the proverbial toilet. I mean, if that’s your sort of thing…

Posted by Liam Colvin | May 2, 2007 7:23 PM

Liam, you clearly penetrated to the heart of Ross' analysis. Where did you develop these stunning critical reading skills? Douthat's argument lies in shambles.

Posted by Tyler Simons | May 2, 2007 7:33 PM

Doesn't incest arguably follow from the logic of straight marriage? Sorry to make such a snarky point, but it seems this argument would have started with the first marriage. If we're going to let a man and a woman get married, why not a man and woman who are brother and sister?

I'm not sure I articulated that effectively, my only real quibble is that you don't have to bring up gay marriage to make the slippery slope argument, since that argument (theoretically) began with the first hetero marriage.

Am I splitting hairs?

Posted by matt | May 2, 2007 7:55 PM

Jacoby's point holds only to the extent that we feel the same lust for sisters and mothers that Jacoby does.

I agree with Ross, that Jacoby is an outlier.

Also, once we decreased the voting age to 18, why not 15? Why not 12? Why have a voting age at all?

Posted by jjj | May 2, 2007 8:25 PM

There's a much more plausible middle ground that's likely to be a coming battlefield: cousin marriage. Americans are traditionally creeped out by cousin marriage, but it's very popular from roughly Morocco to parts of India. Roughly half of all Iraqi married couples are first or second cousins.

Similarly, over half of all Pakistanis in Britain are married a cousin. Arranged cousin marriage is a major engine of immigration -- Dad in Birmingham marries his daughter off to his brother's son in Islamabad, who thereby gets an immigration visa.

Besides the genetic problems, cousin marriage weakens Middle Eastern societies by making them more clannish:

http://www.isteve.com/cousin_marriage_conundrum.htm

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 2, 2007 8:25 PM

matt is 100% right. Gay marriage is no more relevant to the slippery slope to incest argument than is heterosexual marriage. Maybe it opens up the door more to legalizing homosexual incest, but that's it.

Slippery slope rhetoric is, as a whole, bogus. It can be applied to almost all moral judgments.

The nature of ethics and morality, especially as it relates to the enactment of laws, requires the drawing of lines. The lines will almost inevitably be arbitrary to some degree and are almost always subject to some sort of slippery slope.

Also it is worth noting that there are inherent genetic reasons the moral taboo of incest developed. No such genetic reasons exist with homosexual sex or marriage. The fear of homosexual relationships is primarily a function of insecurity and irrational fear.

Posted by Brian | May 2, 2007 8:57 PM

Steve:

One fact you left out of your cousin marriage statistics. One third of the Republican frontrunners for the presidential nomination in 2008 were married to their second cousin.

Maybe Rudy should be running somewhere "from roughly Morocco to parts of India."

Posted by Brian | May 2, 2007 9:01 PM

it will once again be reviled as “unenlightened” and “judgmental”.

Well, do conservatives have a reason for banning incest and/or polygamy that goes beyond grunts of disapproval? I do, but I'm not a conservative, and generally don't find grunting to be a sound basis for public policy. So if my disapproval were grounded solely in grunting, I'd probably switch my position.

Posted by jpe | May 2, 2007 9:16 PM

One other thing that distinguishes incest from gay marriage: relatives already have most of the rights gay couples seek, except filing joint tax returns, and there may be ways around that one, too, that I don't know of. Siblings benefit from intestate succession, have the ability to make medical decisions, have hospital visitation rights. Even in the bad old days when landlords could refuse to lease to unmarried couples, brothers and sisters could live together.

Gay couples, by contrast, require elaborate legal arrangements and instructions to even get hospital visitation rights, and until Lawrence, many states allowed relatives to abrogate those arrangements. This creates a greater perceived need for marriage rights. A larger group of people with a greater need for certain rights has a good chance of obtaining them. Siblings wishing to re-enact the glory days of Hellenistic Egypt have neither the numbers nor the need for marriage.

Posted by Karen | May 2, 2007 9:48 PM

I think there are two points that can be made on the subject. First, as Steve pointed out, cultural acceptance of incest (if cousin-cousin rather than brother-sister) is quite common elsewhere, and I would not doubt that someone would try to mount an Equal Protection claim on cultural/religious grounds. This leads into my second point, namely that it would take a feat of jurisprudential acrobatics to distinguish the once-forbidden love of two members of the same sex from polyamory and consensual adult incest. This is not to say that the Anthony Kennedys of the world would be disinclined to attempt such contortions, only to say that Lawrence v. Texas essentially argued that the government had little or no right to intrude into private relationships between consensual adults. If ultimately a right to same-sex marriage or some form thereof is perceived to proceed from government's ouster from the bedroom, it will be difficult for the justices to create what looks increasingly like an arbitrary distinction; if morality is deemed to be insufficient grounds for violating the so-called privacy rights of consenting adults, is the "yuck" factor going to be any more persuasive?

Posted by Anonymous Conservative | May 2, 2007 10:23 PM

1. Cousin marriage was once quite common in England. Both Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria married first cousins, as did a number of Rothchilds and other luminaries of 19th C. England. Keeping cousins from marrying is most of the plot of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

2. Let me repeat: relatives don't need marriage rights, as most of the benefits already accrue to them. Thus, they lack the crucial incidents of injustice required to overcome the ick factor that attaches to incest for quite excellent biological reasons. With gay marriage, you might argue that it's a bad environment in which to bring up children, but you can't argue that it increases the number of genetic diseases in society. Not so with sibling marriages. Assuming that there are no biological barriers to sibling or parent-child couplings, which is a big and probably baseless assumption, there is the very good argument that we shouldn't increase the likelihood of diseased children. We require vaccinations, restrict parents rights to beat their kids, require them to feed and educate them, so there is precedent for limiting parental freedom in order to benefit their children.

This is a significant distinction from gay couples. They can't have kids naturally with each other, and they don't automatically have legal standing to care for one another. Remember that marriage gives both spouses automatic legal privileges that parents and siblings already have. So, there are already two arguments against legal incest: 1. it's not necessary to allow siblings to marry to give them legal privileges with respect to one another; and 2. there are serious harms from allowing such marriages to any potential children.

Posted by Karen | May 2, 2007 10:44 PM

if morality is deemed to be insufficient grounds for violating the so-called privacy rights of consenting adults, is the "yuck" factor going to be any more persuasive?

Of course on the subject of incest, health is a more than sufficient basis to uphold a law over privacy concerns. Not even the most strained analysis of the Supreme Court's logic in Lawrence could be said to prevent laws that protect public health.

Posted by Brian | May 2, 2007 10:52 PM

Somewhere amidst all this fretting about slippery slopes, ickiness, and the tragic demise of cherished traditional values, Ross does essentially hit the nail on the head.

Gay marriage became a major political issue because there are a large number of actual families in the United States who have already adopted the structure of married life, but lack the legal benefits that accrue to married couples because they have the wrong combination of genitalia. This is why there is a push to sanction gay marriage, not because liberal judges have some perverse desire to destroy marriage and turn America into a boiling cesspool of orgiastic debauchery.

Polyamory is, however, extraordinarily rare, and incestuous sibling couples appear to be virtually non-existent. These issues are not even on the table. The slope has ample traction and there is no evidence of slippage.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | May 2, 2007 11:32 PM

It amazes me how people are making the very same arguments that were used not too long ago that gay "marriage" could never happen to say that legalized incest, bigamy, and polygamy can never happen.

Posted by Shocking, it turns out Santorum was correct! | May 3, 2007 3:48 AM

Brian

If public health is sufficient grounds for preventing such unions than why do we not prevent hemophiliacs from coupling? People genetically predisposed to sickle-cell anemia? Habitual criminals? It too is grasping at straws. What you're left with is moral approbation, which Lawrence v. Texas held is insufficient to permit government into the bedroom.

Posted by Anonymous Conservative | May 3, 2007 9:39 AM

I think Ross' view depends on the Supreme Court not following the logic of its own decisions. Once again the law will be warped because they don't like incest but have nothing against sodomy. Whatever happens to marriage and social mores the law is being whipsawed by sentiment in ways that will be detrimental to people of all sexual proclivities.

Also, the Constitution will be around a long time. How can you be so sure societal mores, celebrity couples and invitro fertilization and sperm donors will lead to a lot more incest than currently exists?

Legalizing abortion was never sold as creating a million abortions a year. Same with pornography.

Posted by jjv | May 3, 2007 11:28 AM

Who are these folks who assured the American people that gay marriage can never happen but are now supporting it? I was busy in elementary school in the 80s and middle school in the early 90s, so I wouldn't have heard.

One reason there might be a difference these days is, it seems to me, that gay and lesbian folks have become, on the whole, more conservative. There isn't nearly as much railing against "heteronormativity" -- more same sex couples want to get married now then when the movement was more radical.

It's interesting that none of those pushing the slippery slope argument here have engaged Ross' post in any substantive way.

I'm just not worried about bigamy and incest sweeping the nation. The overwhelming majority of people, I'm guessing, have no interest whatsoever in getting it on with their siblings. Relationships are complicted enough with just two people, I don't think there's much desire to add to the complications. Plus, everywhere polygamy has/is been common share a very low view of women -- cf, for example Sub-Safaran Africa. When the mormons got themselves celesital wifes, they were taking advantage of 13-17 year old girls. This, I think, is highly unlikely to become a factor in American life, thanks to the gains achieved by American feminists. (Thank God for that!)

Posted by Tyler Simons | May 3, 2007 11:45 AM

Heh, makes me laugh.

What just about everyone is missing is that the slippery slope argument is not actually the problem. The problem is as one wag put it, the “yuck” factor. We are slowly losing the yuck factor and no one seems to be bothered by that. There is quite a bit of social behavior governed by the yuck factor, which we take for granted on a daily basis. One interesting type of yuck factor is being codified in the form of trangendered bathrooms, so that those on the fence won’t be subject to any “yucky” situations or stresses.

Now incest is theoretically more justifiable to ban than gay marriage or unions. I have no truck with sodomy laws however, as they are just as stupid as hate speech laws. Just trying to outlaw conduct you don’t personally approve of. What is missed in the process of legalizing certain types of incest is that the type of erotic love involved with incest is clearly NOT the same as the familial or parental love for a child. Incest pollutes this relationship and make it much, much harder to understand a parent’s or sibling’s *normal* relationship to his/her children/siblings. As with gay marriage, when you remove the cultural restrictions (herd behavior if you want) then you find little if any traction in banning most types of abnormal relationships (polygamy, incest, bestiality, etc.)

I rather liked the comment:
“I'm just not worried about bigamy and incest sweeping the nation. The overwhelming majority of people, I'm guessing, have no interest whatsoever in getting it on with their siblings.”

Which was pretty much the comment in the 80’s when the subject of civil unions came up and people started worrying about gay’s wanting to get married. Nobody thought gays wanted to get married, so what was the worry?

Progressivism tends to manifest itself in breaking down barriers for the sake of breaking them down. There normally is little thought given to the effects of removing cultural taboos, as taboos (the word itself pretty much denigrates the concept) themselves are quantified and quaint and backward.

Cultural restricitions in general tend to succumb to moral fatigue after while when people are relentlessly pummeled with relativistic arguements stating "if they love each other, what's the harm?"

Posted by Liam Colvin | May 3, 2007 12:31 PM

“I'm just not worried about bigamy and incest sweeping the nation. The overwhelming majority of people, I'm guessing, have no interest whatsoever in getting it on with their siblings.”

This is the typically myopic view of changing the definition of marriage - it focuses only on a small number of couples who cannot be legally recognized as married and says, "hey, what's the harm of calling them married, too". The point is that marriage is a public institution, and it's purpose is not to sanction whatever sexual activities are going on - it's purpose is to keep men and women together to raise the children they produce. The problem is not bigamy and incest "sweeping" the nation - it's the breakdown of the institution of marriage sweeping the nation. Then the whole country will look like the inner cities, which are largely the way they are because of the breakdown of marriage.

The whole point of legalizing same-sex marriage for many folks is precisely to deconstruct the meaning of marriage. Read the "Beyond Gay Marriage" manifesto published last year by Gloria Steinem, Cornel West, et al, and then tell me the vision they propose won't result in widespread chaos.

Posted by Mike S. | May 3, 2007 4:53 PM

I'm skeptical - not because the right to incest doesn't arguably follow from the logic of gay marriage, as Jacoby says, but because I think the demand for marrying one's sister is far too low to overcome the "ick" factor involved.

Ross, what was the demand for gay marriage in 1950, and how high was the "ick" factor towards homosexuals (or homosexual sex)?

Posted by Mike S. | May 3, 2007 4:55 PM

I strongly suspect I'm going to regret this, but:

What was the demand for interracial marriage (in the USA, anyway) in 1850? How high was the "ick" factor toward blacks (or toward interracial sex, though evaluation of AfAm haplotypes suggests that there was rather a lot of it going on, public posturing and alleged "ick" notwithstanding; I'd love to )?

If I might paraphrase what I think Ross is saying, the future time when the (roughly constant over time?) demand for incestuous (closer than 1st cousin) marriage can overcome the (weakening over time) resistance is so far out in the future that straight line approximation is meaningless, while we can see the lines crossing in front of our eyes for SSM.

Steve S. says that "Americans are traditionally creeped out by cousin marriage", but this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Map_of_USA_with_Incest_Legality.svg suggests that until recently 1st cousin marriage was legal for well over half the US population (FL and TX having prohibited it in 2005), suggesting that the ick factor didn't turn into that much legislation. I see lots of room for Full Faith and Credit litigation here - anybody know of a pointer to a current summary of the case law (the Wikipedia article points to a bit, e.g. the WI abroad marriage law)?

OTOH, 1st cousin marriage doesn't have the conflict with the alleged teleology of marriage that SSM does, and 1CM is further at least arguably compatible with pre-Hellenic Judaean mores (although both the Catholic and Orthodox churches have in general been fairly hard over against consanguinity in theory).

Posted by empiricus | May 3, 2007 8:00 PM

aargh - hit post rather than re-preview.

1st full paragraph should have ended with:

I'd love to know what the data support as far as per-capita WM/BF couplings versus time from say 1750 to 1950, though I suspect there'd be too many confounding factors (e.g. migration) to see a good pattern. I'd even more love to see a complete trace of SNPs back to the specific well known individuals, a la Jefferson and Hemmings.

Posted by empiricus | May 3, 2007 8:08 PM

We aren't going to see a wave of incestuous marriages because there is a biological mechanism to prevent it. It's called the Westermarck effect. Edvard Westermarck studied Israelis raised in a kibbutz environment where the children were raised communally- and he found that even unrelated children raised in the same household are not sexually attracted as adults.

Posted by Anne E | May 4, 2007 7:20 AM

Liam wrote:

“I'm just not worried about bigamy and incest sweeping the nation. The overwhelming majority of people, I'm guessing, have no interest whatsoever in getting it on with their siblings.”

Which was pretty much the comment in the 80’s when the subject of civil unions came up and people started worrying about gay’s wanting to get married. Nobody thought gays wanted to get married, so what was the worry?

Arguing is so much easier when you just make stuff up and rewrite history. Civil unions only came about because in Hawaii and Vermont same-sex couples petitioned for marriage and won. In Hawaii this led to a constitutional amendment allowing the legislature to prohibit same-sex marriage. In Vermont it led to civil unions. So civil unions were created as a kind of consolation prize because the Vermont legislators didn't think they'd get reelected if they voted for same-sex marriage by that name.

Subsequently California and a few municipalities have extended civil unions or similar formulations.

How, given that history, could anyone with half a brain have believed in the 1980s that gay couples didn't want to get married?

Can you point to ANYTHING that supports the assertion in the second paragraph quoted here? Or did you just make it up because it sounded good?

Posted by Steve | June 5, 2007 4:59 PM

Of course it makes sense. If two people love each other and it is true love then neither society nor the government has any right to interfere. In my opinion, there is nothing at all wrong with incest (except for the age thing....really only sibling incest and cousin incest....mother/son and father/daughter can never be justified because the age difference is too big)

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Posted by Nicole | November 10, 2007 9:02 AM