[TELEGRAPH.CO.UK] A judge in Australia has been criticised after saying incest may no longer be a taboo and that the community may now accept consensual sex between adult siblings.There is neither right nor wrong, you see.
Judge Garry Neilson, from the district court in the state of New South Wales, likened incest to homosexuality, which was once regarded as criminal and "unnatural" but is now widely accepted.
Homosexual incest would be okay, too, right?
He said incest was now only a crime because it may lead to abnormalities in offspring but this rationale was increasingly irrelevant because of the availability of contraception and abortion.
It's not like there should ever be any limits on anybody, right?
"A jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now 'available', not having [a] sexual partner," the judge said.
If she was dead it would be okay, too. Matter of fact, it would be even better if she were dead, since there wouldn't be any of those deformity worries.
"If this was the 1950s and you had a jury of 12 men there, which is what you'd invariably have, they would say it's unnatural for a man to be interested in another man or a man being interested in a boy. Those things have gone."
So now the time is right to get up close and personal with Sis.
Judge Neilson made the comments during the trial of a brother charged with raping his younger sister. The man has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting his sister when she was 10 or 11 years old in 1973 or 1974 but has pleaded not guilty to charges relating to sex they had in 1981, when she was 18 and he was 26.
At 10 or 11 she was too young to say "yes," according to the common law we're in the process of discarding. But that has nothing to do with the fact of incest. That relationship continues all the way into adulthood.
"By that stage they are both mature adults," the judge said.
So are Mom and Dad.
"The complainant has been sexually awoken, shall we say, by having two relationships with men and she had become 'free' when the second relationship broke down.
"Free" in the sense of being unencumbered? Or free is in "liberated from the confining shackles of prudery?" Or free as in "no charge?"
| She was "sexually awoken," as the honourable judge says, by being raped by the older brother who was supposed to protect her from such things. And now society -- in the form of that judge -- instead of protecting her from her predator, would make her a gift to him? There is no Hell too deep. |
Prior to English common law there were still both laws and societal taboos. I can't think of a single society that's condoned brothers slipping the baloney to sisters. The only exception to the rule I know of is dynastic Egypt, where royal inheritance passed through the female and brother-sister was sanctioned. There may be others but I'd bet a dollar they're pretty few and far between.
The comments were labelled misogynistic and "completely disgraceful" by Sally Dowling, the crown prosecutor, who has asked an appeal court to appoint another judge.
One with a bit of sense, perhaps?
"The reference to abortion is particularly repellent," she said.
The judge has none of that old-fashioned prejudice against coat hangers.
Dr Cathy Kezelman, an advocate for preventing child sex abuse, said incest was horrific, regardless of the ages of those involved.
With birth control and abortion and such the taboo may be cracked, but if you permit such a thing between unmarried couples how can you not permit marriage and reproduction to such couples? They need "equal rights," too.
"The relational betrayal of the horrors of incest between a brother and sister of any age is abhorrently criminal," she told The Sydney Morning Herald.
"If it feels good, do it" isn't much of a foundation for a society. Here at Rantburg we're watching a culture that takes prudery to an extreme, while we're living in a society that goes just as far to the other extreme. Could we maybe change our slogan to "if it feels right, do it"?