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Comment by incest | Hacker News Reader

Down votes just show the hypocrisy of anti-incest yet LGBT supporting bigots we still have in this world.

http://socyberty.com/crime/gay-marriage-incest-and-hypocrisy...

Incest and equal rights for LGBT are two completely separate issues. Without going into the merits of the issues, there are pretty much no people lobbying for father/daughter marriages, while there are lots of people lobbying for gay marriage. One goal of society is to codify rules that its members believe in, and in order to do that, people have to speak up. So if you want to marry your kids, start lobbying!

(You can already marry your cousin, if that's good enough for you.)

At the risk of troll feeding, it's inaccurate to say state recognized incestual relationships and state recognized gay relationships are "completely separate issues."

At the heart of the moment for the later is an effort to change what the purpose of marriage is (or, perhaps, recognize a change that has already happened).

Specifically, the move to support gay marriage requires changing the idea of marriage being a relationship primarily concerned with natural procreation into one centered on the expression of romantic "love". You'll note, for instance, that Google is calling its campaign "Legalize Love".

The reason the state has opposed incest is that inbreeding leads to a much higher rate of birth defects.

But if marriage is shifted in focus from being primarily about creating an ideal situation for natural procreation to one based on "love", who is the state to say that two direct relatives are or aren't in "love" with one another?

Incest 'relationships' in the real world are mostly coercive, abusive relationships. Often similar to real world polygamy where young (usually highly religious and often underage) women are married to older patriarchs and young men are shown the door.

There are reasons that some things are banned, and it's not just because of inbreeding.

"Incest 'relationships' in the real world are mostly coercive, abusive relationships."

How do you know? Headlines tell this?

If most incest is abusive, then why we ban that non abusive incest? With the same logic you should ban all narcotics because most of them are evil (still you can buy alcohol legally).

If LGBT and straight is ok but nothing else is not, you should be able give some waterproof arguments.

What the hell does LGBT issues have to do with incest? There are VERY real reason why we as a society don't practice incest.

I agree, and in addition, the probability of incest is much higher for heterosexuals than homosexuals since the probability of two homosexual family members is much much smaller. In other words, when and if support for legalising incest arises, it will most likely be by heterosexuals, not the LGBT community.

You have to define incest. For some definitions it actually has a lot to do with it. For other definitions not so much.

Certainly SSM has little to do with hypothetical brother/sister marriages. But what about first cousin marriages? These are legal in a bit over half the states including California, and in a bit under half the states such marriages are banned as incest. South Carolina, always an odd-ball, allows marriages of first cousins, provided they aren't double first cousins.

Now, what makes this interesting is that sometimes first cousins get married in a state like California and then they move to a state that does not recognize such marriages (I think I read a case from Arkansas). In every case to date where this has been challenged, the marriage has been upheld, but it isn't clear the new state of residency is required Constitutionally to recognize the marriage. Usually it is settled on a conflict of laws basis. The only cases where the marriage has been invalidated thus far (this could change due to Arizona's strange laws, see below) were where residents of a state that banned the practice travelled to another state for the sole purpose of getting married and then immediately returned.

Occasionally anti-SSM laws end up colliding here. For example Arizona passed a law stating that all marriages that could not legally be done in Arizona would be treated as if they didn't exist. This was done in order to prevent SSM from being recognized in Arizona without specifically singling gays and lesbians out. So it covers first cousins, etc too. Well, then the Cooks got divorced, being first cousins from Virginia who had married there and later moved to Arizona before this law was enacted. The law was ruled not to apply to them on retroactivity grounds (similar to the CA Supreme Court holding that Prop 8 could not be retroactive).

So beyond SSM cases likely drawing on incest cases, you have the potential for things to go the other way.

If choice of marriage partners is a fundamental right subject to strict scrutiny, then does that mean we hold incest bans to strict scrutiny and only allow states to forbid sex or marriage between brother and sister, mother and son, and father and daughter? Wouldn't first cousin marriage bans have to fall? Would infertile brother/sister couples get to (ahem) mount as-applied challenges to such bans? I think that would be a mess.

Also keep in mind that to date there have been a lot more first cousin couples married in the US than there have been same-sex couples, so a lot of the common legal issues have been litigated in an incest context first.

Edit: I highly recommend Andrew Koppelman's (pro-SSM) work on this subject: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=665701 Among other things he looks at how bigamy, incest, and pre-Loving miscegenation cases impact the SSM legal question. Koppleman is also the author of the classic law review paper entitled "Dumb and DOMA"

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