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Miscellaneous See other Miscellaneous Articles Title: Switzerland considers repealing incest laws The upper house of the Swiss parliament has drafted a law decriminalising sex between consenting family members which must now be considered by the government. There have been only three cases of incest since 1984. Switzerland, which recently held a referendum passing a draconian law that will boot out foreigners convicted of committing the smallest of crimes, insists that children within families will continue to be protected by laws governing abuse and paedophilia. Daniel Vischer, a Green party MP, said he saw nothing wrong with two consenting adults having sex, even if they were related. "Incest is a difficult moral question, but not one that is answered by penal law," he said. Barbara Schmid Federer of The Christian People's Party of Switzerland said the proposal from the upper house was "completely repugnant." "I for one could not countenance painting out such a law from the statute books." The Protestant People's Party is also opposed to decriminalising the offence which at present carries a maximum three year jail term. A spokesman for the party said: "Murder is also quite rare in Switzerland but no one suggests that we remove that as an office from the statutes." And at The National Post puppy found this; A bill under consideration in Switzerland would decriminalize incest. Switzerland already allows marriage between second-degree relatives (aunt/uncle, niece/nephew); the new measure would overturn the ban on consensual sexual relationships between siblings, and between parents and their adult children. While incest remains “taboo”, according to a government spokesperson, “it’s not up to criminal law to stop every morally reprehensible aspect of behavior. Rather, the law should be for punishing behavior that’s particularly socially damaging.” Discuss. Barbara Kay in Montreal: Switzerland has come a long way from chocolate, cuckoo clocks, punctuality and melty cheese. But in what direction? Euthanasia on demand and now incest! Incest is a taboo in virtually every society on earth, and there is an excellent reason for that. More than one reason. The obvious reason to those who know the epidemiology around it is that incestuous relationships are far more likely to produce physical and mental deficits in the following generations. But our ancestors didn’t know that, so there must have been another good reason. Namely, that if children under our protection or children brought up in each other’s company are perceived as sexual objects, the family unit cannot survive. The law would specify “adult children” but parents for whom the incest taboo has been erased may well start grooming their children for sexual activity later in the same way a pedophile grooms his victims. What does “consensual” mean when a child has been groomed to love her father or brother in a sexual way for years? What kind of consent is that on the child’s part? This proposed law is a licence for perverts to sexualize their children with the full approval of the law. The whole point of a family is to protect children from sexualization until they are old enough to deal with its complex and tumultuous effects. Good grief. Is nothing sacred? Apparently not. Matt Gurney in Toronto: Well, my only quibble with what Barbara said is that I suspect our ancestors probably figured out to stop knocking up their siblings the same way they discovered what meats not to leave out in the sun and what mushrooms were bad to munch on — lots of trial and error with few second chances. Other than that, I’m not sure I can say it better than she did. The entire issue of informed consent to sexual activity rests upon the assumption that the citizen is capable of making good decisions for themselves (somewhat more true in theory than practice, of course, but it’s the assumption we all have to work with). The only way to create an even playing field in a society where Barbara’s disturbing scenario of sexual indoctrination among family members occurs would be to establish some form of sexual ethics education outside of the family, which seems not only Orwellian, but bureaucratically cumbersome. (Can you imagine getting The Talk from a state employee reading from a script that took 11 years, 1.2-billion francs and 14 blue ribbon panels to draft?). Normalizing sexual relations between parent and child makes responsible sex education and the imparting of moral values in the home not only tricky, but arguably a conflict of interest. The same would be true of siblings as well … perhaps to a lesser extent, but I’m willing to err on the side of caution on that one. What will be interesting to see, however, will be how long it takes until we hear about some of those bizarre and unfortunate cases where close genetic relations, who grew up separately, became romantically and sexually involved in ignorance after meeting later in life. What once was tabloid fodder might soon be legal precedent. Kevin Libin in Honolulu: Hang on a minute. Barbara’s point about the entrenchment of incest as a universal societal taboo is an important one. What it tells us is that incest is unacceptable even without the word of formal authority. Therefore, whether the Swiss decriminalize it or not, incest will remain widely intolerable. More to the point, even where it is illegal, and offensive, some people will continue to practice — Exhibit A: the Columbia University professor charged last week with carrying on a three-year sexual relationship with his adult daughter. Not to mention the numerous adults charged in the U.S. and Canada every year for sexually abusing their minor children. The sad reality is that this is one of those issues with no good answers. You could raise the genetic defect argument, as Barbara has, but we don’t jail parents with Down’s Syndrome for having children. And there seems no real point in the government going to the trouble and immense expense of imprisoning a vasectomized brother for sleeping with his sister, or a pair of siblings for carrying on a homosexual relationship. That said, at the very least, a law signals what society tolerates as acceptable or unacceptable. The only real purpose, then, for a law like this is to raise the psychological hurdle for child abuse by making parent-child relations always, and everywhere, repulsive. If it weren’t already illegal, it would seem superfluous to make it so; where it is illegal, undoing that can only send the wrong message. Switzerland’s status quo should rule if only because a public recantation of incest laws at this point will be misinterpreted as tacit state tolerance — something that could, indeed, prove to be quite socially damaging. Barbara Kay: Kevin’s last line about “tacit state tolerance” is important. In less secular times, people did not download their sense of right and wrong from the state, but from God. In our morally relativistic times, we assign ridiculous weight to what the government decides to make legal or illegal as a sign of what is morally permissible. There are plenty of people, morally adrift and kinky, who will only too happily internalize the idea that they are doing nothing wrong because the state tells them they are not criminals for doing it. The good thing about keeping incest illegal is that it inhibits complicity or silence from others. A friend of mine is a survivor of childhood incest. Her father was in my opinion a sociopath. Confronted in her adulthood, he admitted to the incest and called it “love” with blithe indifference to the disgust of others. My friend candidly admits that after so many years of grooming, seduction and confusion, it took years of therapy (and AA – a high number of alcoholic women are survivors of incest, as she found out) to resist the siren call of her father’s voice on the telephone, even as a mature adult with a supportive family of her own. Sterile brothers and sisters who want to flout the law will be rare, and we shouldn’t worry about them. It is the pederast parents with no conscience who, if indifferent to God’s and society’s disapproval, must at least be made to fear the state’s punishment for their always-damaging behaviour to those under their protection. Matt Gurney: I agree with Barbara that it is important that there be something we can point to, other than personal unease, to “back up” society’s condemnation of incest. In a secular age with reliable birth control mostly ruling out the risk of unwanted, genetically vulnerable kids, we may have to go to the law for a justification-of-last-resort. (Part of me wonders if this were to be passed, whether or not sex with an opposite-sex sibling would come to draw little more than the kind of societal disapproval as smoking and drinking while pregnant: “I’m not judging you for what you do with your own body, but how dare you risk hurting an unborn baby!”) Kevin’s points are well taken, though, that an incestuous relationship between siblings where offspring is not a possibility, as in the case of sterility or homosexual contact, while plenty warped, is less repulsive. Perhaps we’re discovering where the libertarian’s point of no return on this issue is – I would hope that everyone would agree that parent-child incest is almost always going to be offside due to the unavoidable taint of coercion, but can we — without resorting to religion, society’s judgment or just the general gross-out factor — find a legally valid, democratically defensible reason that two adult brothers shouldn’t be able to have sex? Would all our objections disappear so long as the proposed Swiss law still applied to parents or other familial guardians? That’s all theoretical, of course, because I think Kevin had it right when he said that repealing legal sanctions against incest would serve to signal tacit tolerance and that’s reason enough to resist it. Kevin Libin: So we can be certain that no reasonable person—and probably few unreasonable ones — are going to ever think a parent-child relationship is something that should be legal, even when the child in question is the age of majority. The potential for exploitation of the power dynamic can simply never be fully removed from the equation. Perhaps, then, the problem is this broad definition of incest, one that captures both something as socially inconsequential as a pair of sisters fooling around with each other, and something as socially destructive and individually abusive as a parent taking advantage of a child. Switzerland already allows relations involving uncles, and cousins. So, let them throw in the siblings, too: as icky as we may find that, it just seems a futile-to-wasteful use of resources to prosecute and imprison brothers and sisters for something that harms no one — if, and this is an important condition, there is no power exploitation involved, and that they don’t aim to reproduce (this kind of behaviour, by the way, is only enabled by state-run health care systems that upload the financial risk of producing genetically damaged children to the state). But for legislators to contemplate lumping in and legitimizing parent-child relationships, when there can never be a guarantee of “consent” in such an inequitable relationship, is clearly the relinquishment of the paramount duty of the modern liberal state: to protect from coercion and violence those who are unable to protect themselves. National Post
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Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 3.
#2. To: HOUNDDAWG (#0)
Sounds to me like someone's got a cute cousin.
In the South they have an expression: "He doesn't many branches on his family tree."
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