Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Incest is cancer
If concern for the traditional family unit is not enough to justify opposition to same-sex marriage, is it enough to justify opposition to adult incest? Will Saletan makes the case for continuing the moral taboo against adult incest, even if our society has grown less comfortable condemning decisions between consenting adults pertaining to sex.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/12/incest-is-cancer.html
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I agree with Saletan. One could even go so to the theorist Rene Girard. Girard posited that certain practices were forbidden because of the tendency they had to undermine stability in society. Incest, as a root cause of familial mimetic violence, would naturally fall under such a prohibition. This makes sense — what mother, without a societal prohibition on incest, could fail to see a daughter as a rival to her affections with her husband, and begin to desire the daughter’s demise? And vice-versa, the husband and son? Removing such a prohibition would tend to undermine the stability of any society, and the very survival of the species. Cousins and remoter relations would remove the instant possibility of such violence, and so the prohibition would not obtain.