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'll play devil's advocate...
...
We've seen nearly identical, statistical arguments made against transexuality, against homosexuality, against miscegenation. Those arguments do, indeed, arise from puritanical attitudes, and fail here for the same reason they've failed everywhere else.
Genetic Sexual Attraction between relatives separated at a young age is a common enough phenomenon to argue that "the vast majority" and "it's far more likely" statistical arguments don't actually stand up to scrutiny.
"power dynamics are very fucked" is a valid concern in relationships arising from formalized superior/subordinate social structures in general, which include teacher/student, jailer/inmate, doctor/patient, parent/child, etc. But, those social structures don't necessarily arise in sibling, cousin, and certain nibling relationships. They don't arise in scenarios where the individuals were separated early and did not reunite until adulthood. They don't arise in cases of "accidental incest", where the parties are unaware of kinship beforehand. The "power dynamics" argument actually extends only to a narrow category of incestuous relationships. They justify prohibitions against that narrow category, but they don't justify prohibitions against the general case.
Your arguments don't actually challenge OP's position. The presence of complicated power dynamics issues would conflict with the "consent" requisite they presented.
I disagree. There was a time when I was more partial to OP's perspective, but it's the arguments I made here, not suddenly developing some "puritanical attitude," limited exclusive to this topic, that convinced me that perspective was wrong.
None of the arguments against the other things are "nearly identical." Trans people are statistically a small percentage of the population, but on a large scale small percentages show up. Homosexual relationships are not constrained to a handful of people like incestuous ones are, so you can seek out other people even if the percentage is small. Your comparisons, as well as your assumptions about the motives behind my position (which isn't really important regardless) fall flat.
If one in a million people are naturally into mother/son relationships, the chances of it happening naturally are 1 in a trillion. And that's only saying that they're potentially ok with such a relationship, whether they actually get along is another question. It's safe to say that it simply doesn't happen, and if by some miracle it does, it's a trivial percentage of cases which is secondary to the majority of cases where it's the product of abuse/grooming.
As someone with siblings, they absolutely do.
And courts often make exceptions in those cases, and if OP had limited their position to those cases they might have had a point. But OP took the "strong" version of the claim. In fact, the specific story involved both a mother/son relationship, where you acknowledge power dynamics are relevant, and a situation where the two people were not separated growing up. If you want to defend OP then you have to defend that.
That's like saying roofies should be legal because some people would consent to having sex while drugged. Technically, sure, again, if you're looking at it purely in the abstract. In practice, the vast majority of the time, drugging someone before having sex with them is rape. Which means if the law makes an exception for consensual drugging, it's one more thing the victim has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. On the other hand, if roofied sex is fully illegal, then a small handful of people might be inconvenienced and have to find another way to get off, but a much larger number of people will be kept safe.
In a world where less than 4% of rapists face convictions, adding additional hurdles for rape victims to clear is obviously a bigger concern than inconvincing the much smaller number of people trying to shag their sisters. It is far better to err on the side of caution.
Ok, I can do that pretty easily: OP did not defend this specific mother/son relationship. Transcribed from the images the posted:
OP was contemplating the general case of incest, not this specific one. OP explicitly declared that this specific case should be criminalized, and chose to discuss inoffensive behaviors.
To address the remainder of your comment: In everything you're describing, the offensive behavior is the imbalance of power. You are not describing "biological kinship" as the offensive factor. You are using "biological kinship" as an implication that a social power imbalance exists. You're allowing for exceptions to criminalization on the basis of biological kinship, if the power balance implied by that relationship doesn't actually exist. You don't seem to actually have a problem with the biological kinship. You have a problem with the power imbalance.
Why not just prohibit the power imbalance?
Why confuse the issue of power and consent by first weaving it through biological and genetic circumstance?
"Power imbalance" avoids the non-problematic incestuous relationships for which you allow judicial exception, while also capturing problematic non-incestuous relationships, like step-parents/step-children, and socially-close relatives too distant to qualify as incest (third cousins, being communally raised, for example)
The attraction between adopted children and their biological relatives is not at all rare. It's a very well known phenomenon. Reuniting parties are widely cautioned to expect sexual attraction to their long-lost family members. It's not "one in a million" behavior. I completely reject your statistical arguments because they have no basis in reality.
This is a nonsense point because decisions will still have to be made regarding what is and isn't a power imbalance. If you change the law to allow incest but only if there's no power imbalance, then eventually courts will have to decide whether there is inherently a power imbalance in such relationships, whether a parent/child relationship automatically qualifies or not. All you're doing is moving from a practical standard to a theoretical one, but then you'll have to move back to a practical standard, you know, in practice.
Since it's true that there is almost always a power imbalance in incestuous relationships, the law should reflect that. If the courts rule correctly, then legal precedent will make incest functionally illegal regardless, so it's just shifting the decision from the legislative branch to the judicial, which there's no real reason to do.
Yes, correct. The standard that I'm applying theoretically already is consent and whether there's a power imbalance, and based on that theoretical standard I am arriving at the practical conclusion of banning incest.
In the same way, I don't have a problem with roofies in theory, I have a problem with the fact that in practice they are used to rape people. That doesn't mean that I should want to legalize roofies.
Those are the only decisions that need to be made. Those are the only points that need to be raised. When two parties engage in a relationship, and don't discover a biological kinship until later, that biological kinship cannot alter the nature of the relationship to the point of criminality. The "incest" component is completely irrelevant to the issue of criminality.
The power imbalance is the sine qua non of the issue. Without the power imbalance, the right of free association greatly exceeds the authority of the public and the state to violate the personal agency of the participants.
Among consenting adults, they are already legal.
Yes, and the determination I have made is that cases of incest overwhelmingly involve issues with consent. Whether that decision is made legislatively or judicially is not important.
Agreed.
Disagree. That does not follow.
Should it be legal to run out of a bank, holding a trash bag and wearing a stocking over your face, and to jump into the back of a car shouting, "GO! GO! GO!"? If you did all that without actually robbing the bank, technically, you didn't harm anyone. And if someone tries to forcibly stop you while doing your silly little prank, should they be criminally liable for using force?
That would be absurd. If you see someone doing that, then you can reasonably assume that they robbed a bank. You don't have to see them sticking up a cashier or shoving the money into the bag to arrive at that conclusion. In this example, you can't really verify those things because by the time you do they'll have gotten away, while in the case of incest, it's generally impossible to verify because family members are going to be spending so much time privately, it's always going to come down to "he said, she said" which is not enough to prove things beyond a reasonable doubt. It may be an imposition on freedom for it to be illegal to do that specific prank, but the other concerns obviously outweigh it. Just do a different prank, aka, just fuck one of the 7 billion people out there who's not your mom. It's not a big ask.
Therefore, to legalize incest means that nearly every pedophile or groomer will be able to get away with it, because it puts the child into a position of having to prove something that they could not reasonably prove. If a parent takes a child aside, 1-on-1, at some point in all the time they're alone together, and grooms them to believe incest is normal and fine, then how could they ever prove those words were said beyond a reasonable doubt to a court? What, are we expecting 5 year olds to be secretly recording every single thing their parents ever say to them? It's ridiculous.
The state's first responsibility is the safety of the citizenry, and with the danger I just highlighted, the right to not get groomed or molested vastly outweighs the right of free association.
No they are not, with very good reason.
You seem to be assuming that "incest" implies "pedophilia". However, OP is explicitly referring to relationships between adults, not children. The legal status of incest does not affect in the slightest the illegality of grooming or pedophilia. Regardless of the legal status of incest, adult/adult relationships are readily distinguishable from adult/child relationship. Relationships between teachers and pupils, jailers and inmates, guardians and wards, parents and children, doctors and patients, is criminalized separate and apart from incest. Incest does not need to be criminalized for the general, power-imbalanced relationship to remain criminalized.
Any argument involving minors is well outside the scope of this discussion, as is any argument of non-consenting adults or individuals lacking mental capacity. Restrict your arguments to relationships involving capable, consenting adults.
In the context if individuals deliberately and voluntarily imbibing them, nothing in your link makes a special distinction of illegality between rohypnol and other schedule IV drugs that don't induce unconsciousness or amnesia. That your partner chooses to use cocaine or rohypnol makes them a criminal drug user, but their drug use says nothing of your criminal culpability. I think we've taken the roofie argument beyond any useful analogy.
Not at all. It can, of course. And it's generally impossible to determine if the fucking started before or after everyone turned 18.
It does, however, almost always imply grooming.
And the legal status of roofies doesn't affect in the slightest the illegality of rape. It would just make it way, way easier to get away with if they were legal, which is exactly why they aren't. It's exactly the same way with incest.
Absolutely not. If a mother and son start fucking after the son turns 18, the whole reason I'm opposed to that is because there's no way to know how that child was raised and what they were taught before they turned 18. If they were groomed, then they cannot consent even when they are of legal age.
What happens before they're 18 is extremely relevant to the discussion, and it's literally the whole basis of my position.
You said it was legal. It isn't legal. Nobody said anything about that distinction.
If you drug your partner, even with their consent, it is a criminal act.
We're mostly in agreement. However:
Acknowledge Genetic Sexual Attractions. This is a very common phenomenon, where upon reunification as adults, adoptees are sexually attracted to their biological kin. In very many cases, we can know how that child was raised, and we can know that the biological parent had no influence on the minor child.
The "grooming" circumstance you describe is already criminalized under laws that apply to where one is in a position of power or authority over the other. The status of incest does not affect these laws. The status of incest only affects the situation I described above, where there is no unequal position of power or authority, no undue influence over a minor.
If the "whole reason" is that grooming can't be criminalized without criminalization of incest, your "whole reason" is defeated, and you have no further justification to prohibit incest.
If it's with their consent, you aren't drugging them. They are drugging themselves. You commit no criminal act. The whole "rohypnol" argument has devolved into nonsense. No reasonable analogy arises from it.
You're shifting the goalposts. As I already said, courts generally make exceptions in those cases. The reason incest is illegal is for the cases you're trying to exclude, where grooming is a possibility.
Can you cite even a single example where someone went to jail over a case like you described?
Completely false. The drug itself is illegal so drugging them is a criminal act. That's what the drug being illegal means.
Not at all. The reason rohypnol is illegal - which it is, even if you try to pretend otherwise - is because it facilitates rape. The reason it is illegal even in situations where it isn't facilitating rape - which it is, even if you try to pretend otherwise - is because the individual freedom to have drugged sex is greatly outweighed by the freedom to not get raped, and it is too difficult to ensure it's being used consensually.
The reason incest is illegal is because it facilitates rape. By the exact same logic, it makes sense for it to be illegal even if there are cases where it isn't facilitating rape. Because the freedom to not get groomed outweighs the freedom to fuck your mom, and you have to choose one or the other.
So the analogy is perfectly valid, even if you try to pretend otherwise.
That argument is complete nonsense. Legal genetic sexual attraction and legal accidental incest does not facilitate rape. Criminalizing rape does not require criminalization of incest. The entire argument is nonsensical. Rejected outright.
Nah. OP set the goalposts of capable and consensual adult relationships. I've tolerated your diverting exploration of pedophiles and groomers, but I'm dragging you back to that original point.
Society and State need compelling reasons to strip individuals of their personal agency. In the situations OP describes, there is no compelling reason. That they would even go to the courts is a problem that should not exist. The capable and consenting individuals involved have no need to justify themselves before the courts.
You can "reject it outright" all day long, it doesn't make my argument any less correct. Legalized incest very much does facilitate rape because of grooming. Criminalization of rape does not require criminalization of roofies, so long as you don't care whether the law against rape is actually enforced. People who do care about preventing rape support the criminalization of means of facilitating it, means such as roofies and incest.
You could've just said, "No, I can't find a single case, I'm just whining about a problem that doesn't exist."
No, sorry, again, criminalization of grooming does not require criminalization of incest, and criminalization of incest does not address all incidence of grooming. Grooming must be criminalized separately, because not all grooming is via an incestuous relationship. The legal status of incest has no bearing on grooming. Grooming is not at all relevant to the circumstances OP discusses.
I could have, but that would be dishonest. Jail is not the only possible consequence. Before homosexuality was decriminalized, you would have had a hard time finding people admitting to knowing people who had been jailed for it. Before homosexuality was decriminalized, you didn't have a lot of homosexual looking for marriage licenses, for example.
Bigotry is always a problem regardless of whether you can name a victim of it.
Hey, I appreciate the discussion. This has honestly been fun. We should do it again sometime.
Again you keep harping on "requiring," something I never said. Incest does facilitate grooming.
I didn't ask "do you know someone this happened to" I asked "has this ever happened?" I can absolutely find cases of people being jailed for homosexuality from before it was decriminalized.
Is it? Is there any other form of "bigotry" where you can't name a victim?
Gotta say that it's strange that you enjoy talking to bigots. But I guess victimless bigotry is lower stakes.