by Ben Johnson
This article was first published October 31, 2014, at LifeSiteNews.com.
The New York state Court of Appeals has trimmed back a state law banning incestuous marriages, allowing an uncle and niece to marry one another. The decision allows the woman, a Vietnamese immigrant, to avoid deportation. Read more…
When marriage laws are amended to bring same-sex couples within their ambit, those couples become subject to the existing restrictions imposed by blood and family ties (consanguinity and affinity) which forbid people from marrying someone too close to them. So if a woman cannot marry her brother, uncle or nephew, neither can she marry her sister, aunt or niece. Simple, right? As far as it goes, yes. But not once we consider the rationale behind consanguinity restrictions and what the application of the “marriage equality” paradigm to them is likely to lead to. Read more…
In an interview published Monday, Hollywood director Nick Cassavetes, whose new movie Yellow tells the story of a fictional love affair between an adult sister and brother, claimed that incest is just the latest frontier in people throwing off the shackles of rigid, cultural convention and following their hearts. Read more…
by Michael Cook
With the legalisation of same-sex marriage, real marriage becomes just one of a range of legally-recognised options.
How is this law going to hurt your marriage? That is the jeer hurled at opponents of New York’s new same-sex marriage law. As the Boston Globe put it memorably some time ago, same-sex marriage will “no more undermine traditional marriage than sailing undermines swimming”. Read more…
Matthew Franck writes today about how we have lost the moral vocabulary to even talk about what’s wrong with incest.
natural hierarchies, duties, and trusts are shattered by incest, even between “consenting adults.” But the recent discussions of this matter reveal how decayed is our moral vocabulary for considering it, how nearly lost is any understanding that our various loves have their natures and purposes, which must be respected if those loves are to conduce to our happiness. Only such decay can account for the failure to grasp that a man cannot be a father to his lover, or a lover to his daughter…. Read more…
Albert Mohler weighs in on the incest controversy that we have already discussed on this blog. I want to add one point that I haven’t seen anyone raise. People seem to think that the “ick” factor is not significant because it cannot be entirely explained on rational grounds. (Mohler’s quote from Wm. Saletan is to this effect.)
But we should not entirely dismiss the “ick” factor. To say that incest is “icky” is to say that it is unthinkable. That is what taboos are supposed to do: take a given behavior off the table, to make that behavior completely unworthy of consideration by any decent person.
Why? Because if people start asking themselves, “gee, would sex with my father really be so harmful in this particular case?” or “could I get away with sex with my daughter in this particular case?” Read more…
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