December 15, 2010
THAT'S NOT ACTUALLY THE QUESTION:
Incest Is Cancer (William Saletan, Dec. 14, 2010, Slate)
Incest is for hicks. That's the stereotype among educated liberals: Homosexuality is urbane, polygamy is for Mormons, and incest is for hayseeds. So when David Epstein, a Columbia University political scientist, was charged last week with third-degree incest for allegedly shagging his adult daughter, the blogosphere erupted. Conservatives called it another sign of moral chaos. Liberals said it was gross but shouldn't be prosecuted. One side defends the privacy of all consensual sex; the other side sees an inexorable descent from homosexuality to incest.Let's try to come up with something better. If gay sex is OK, how can incest be wrong?
More significantly, if homosexuality is OK why is murder wrong? Having abandoned morality in cases where you don't like the result it renders how do you get to invoke it in cases where you do like the result?
