Legality of incest?

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This has been happening for centuries. There have always been popular "sperm donors", i.e. Don Juans with a procreative strategy that is best described as "hit and run".

Studies show that 10% of all children were not fathered by their legal fathers, and the actual number might be even higher. Handsome promiscuous men (or celebrities; think of rock stars and groupies) father vastly more children than anyone else. Their offspring grows up in different families with different alleged fathers and is completely unaware that they are closely related.

Droit du seigneur / ius primae noctis also comes to mind in this context.

^

Genghis Khan probably caused a lot of unintentional incest.

For what it's worth, I agree. Unfortunately, when we thought up a lot of different ways to treat reproductive issues such as infertility, we didn't exactly consider the unintended consequences. I say, "When in doubt, don't."

The Amish have a lot of inbreeding. Most of them are cousins. They don't marry close relatives though.

However, because of all the inbreeding they are now having quite a bit of genetic abnormalities showing up.

Do Pacific island natives suffer from genetic abnormalities?

Where I grew up, hooking up with someone you weren't somehow related to was a difficult task to accomplish. Heck, I almost married my high school sweetheart, and we were even related by marriage.

When my grandfather remarried, his wife had a really CUTE great-grandaughter that I really enjoyed hanging out with for extended periods.

My cousin, who lived next door, remarried after a divorce and his new wife brought along a beautiful young teenager about my age.

The great-granddaughter and the step-daughter next door had serious issues. The former was fairly stable mentally, at least, and pretty cute once you get past the tomboyish looks and tobacco-dipping habit--but she'd also been a victim of abuse by family members and was promiscuous from an early age. The latter came from a pretty messed up home before her mom married my cousin, and the mom had some issues herself. She eventually got knocked up at least a couple of times and never seemed to really have much of a future.

In a strange twist of irony, her uncle eventually married my mom after my dad passed away.

It's hard to avoid this kind of drama when you live in rural areas away from cities. I'm just thankful my life took a different direction than that. The woman I eventually did marry, oddly enough, shares physical features not unlike my mom, and the two of us have very similar looks--we joke about being brother and sister, though we are far from it. Our children do not resemble us at all--my son looks like his maternal grandfather, and my daughter inherited my father's blue eyes. To a degree I'll admit I miss some of the sweet people I got to know growing up. I'm really hoping, though, I can give my own children better experiences than I had, especially when it comes to potential romantic relationships.

"You know you're a redneck when your family tree is a straight line."

Almost everybody in this town we live in now is somehow related. There are about ten different original families and we have lots of people who are related to many of their descendants. If my son marries his baby mama that will make my daughter, his sister, a distant cousin of her fiance. Even though we didn't even come from here.

The Amish live in much smaller communities though, so the inbreeding is more condensed and the anomolies are more prevelant.

From what I have read, it's not the fact that you have a baby with a sibling or a parent that causes the problems, it's because you much more likely to share the same recessive genes. Even if you have the same recessive genes that doesn't mean that the child will have problems. It's when the child gets the particular recessive gene from both parents that the anomoly occurs. With a much smaller gene pool, as the Amish have, there are more chances of both parents having the genes, and because they have large families, each couple takes more chances, so therefore, the odds are higher that an Amish child from a small gene pool would have a higher chance of an anomoly than a child from a gene pool that is larger, but still limited.

It's the same with cousins marrying.

The question of incest provides a good illustration of what's wrong with the "liberal" approach to morality. Most people throughout history have understood that a functioning society depends on its members (or at least most of them) abiding by social norms, and that those social norms are decided upon through understanding human nature and through surveying the accumulated wisdom of the ages. The point, then, about taboos and laws against deviant behaviour is not to pretend that such behaviour does not exist or to enable the authorities to bug people's homes, but to keep such deviant behaviour out of the public sphere and to discourage people on the borderlines from indulging in it.

Most people - even liberals - instinctively feel there is something quite abnormal and wrong about incest. But liberals have trouble saying as much, because to them, all that matters is what people "consent" to.

Of course, the subject of incest raises the question of where a person's family ends. Fuzzy sets are another concept liberals struggle with - or pretend to, when it suits them.

In Germany they are debating whether or not to enact a law against bestiality, since no such law currently exists. There is an article and thread about it here: http://www.thelocal.de/society/20120203-40531.html

Some of the comments on the thread for some strange reason remind me of WrongPlanet. Liberals are much the same throughout the West:

Well, you have to admit it's all quite logical. If all that matters in questions of morality is what the other party consents to, then a society that condones meat-eating has no business judging people who have sexual relations with animals.

I bow before liberals and their awesome powers of reasoning.

There is a slight difference between sleeping with your sister and sleeping with your dog.

Both are weird/wrong in my opinion, but one can be consensual and one is inherently non consensual.

That is not quite correct. First of all, you won't find many liberals who advocate the legalisation of bestiality. This liberal / social democrat certainly doesn't. Like abacacus pointed out, non-human animals can't consent to sexual intercourse with humans.

It is also not correct that animal rapists get away scot-free in Germany (that was no slight against Scots btw ). Although zoophile acts are not expressly forbidden, we have laws against both zoophile pornography and animal cruelty. The German Protection of Animals Act prohibits inflicting pain on animals or violating their physical integrity without a valid reason. Valid reasons include necessary medical procedures (things like declawing are illegal), scientific research and meat production, but animal slaughter is also required to be humane and painless.

If somebody rapes a dog, he commits an act of animal cruelty/abuse can be prosecuted under this law. It is also likely that such a person would find himself in a psychiatric clinic, which, as I read, is what happened to someone who was caught raping cows in a field. As for the supposed animal brothels that were mentioned in the article, I have never heard of any such thing. If there are establishments of this sort, they operate in secret. This kind of organized animal abuse would also be punished under the Protection of Animals Act. There is no need for a separate anti-bestiality paragraph.

The only possible grey area in the German law that I can think of are non-penetrative (i.e., oral or masturbatory) sexual activities involving animals, since this is technically not an act of cruelty. But I could imagine that this would also be seen as abuse and penalized accordingly. In any case, when something like this is brought to attention, it will likely result in a psychiatric evaluation and subsequent hospitalization of the misguided "animal lover".

^^ What about donkey shows, where a woman bends over and does it with a donkey? The donkey is obviously consenting because he's not backing away and he's doing the work. Would that be sexual abuse of an animal, when he's obviously enjoying it and doing it because he's been given the opportunity, or would it just be gross and twisted?

I am not advocating sex with animals. I think it's gross and sick and can't imagine why anyone would do it, but I'm just wondering if that would be considered nonconsensual, abuse, or just nuts?

I file that under nuts, personally.

I also think it's nuts And nonconsensual to boot.

I have often read the sentence "a biological response does not equal consent" in the context of rape. Some rape victims report a physical reaction during the abuse, sometimes even an orgasm, but it was nonetheless psychologically damaging and traumatizing for them. The donkey in this kind of stage act is probably also deeply disturbed by the experience, although his body responds to the physical stimulation.

Of course one could argue that horse and cattle breeders basically do the same when they extract semen from a male animal in order to artificially inseminate a female. But at least they follow hygiene procedures. In a donkey show, there is genital contact between the actress and the animal, which could lead to bacterial or yeast infections of the donkey's urinary tract. For that reason alone, I would consider this animal abuse. There is also a risk of zoonosis and the emergence of new diseases. Nobody wants a venereal version of avian flu or swine flu.

Neither you nor abacus have addressed the point that the person I quoted was trying to make, which is this -
Animals cannot consent to being eaten either. So should we conclude that a society that condones meat-eating has no business condemning bestiality?
If not, then perhaps the question of consent is not the be-all and end-all as far as morality is concerned.

I'm just wondering ... does the US Constitution say anything about bestiality?