I don't think you can deny this since its happening with other issues.
Yes, I can. I appreciate your concern about slippery slope but I don't think it applies here. First, nobody supports incest except those who practice it and even then it's a rationalization, not an endorsement. There's no debate where you find a side supporting it. You need an advocacy group before there can be a slip down the slope. There's no argument that it is acceptable, let alone desirable, let alone compelling, to practice incest. Where's your NAMBLA equivalent? Could one emerge?
You can't rationalize incest as a categorical thing the way NAMBLA rationalizes its proclivities because there's something uniquely attractive to them in one class of people, one cohort, boys. With incest, there is nothing physically/sexually different about the object of one's incestuous interest. The father or daughter is not attracted to the other because that person has a generic attraction to the father or daughter cohort but because of an attraction between two individual people who happen to be father and daughter. This is not a category attraction but an individual attraction. You can't make a class case out of it like you can with the categories that you are comparing it to.
Second, it would be so rare that no one outside the immediate community would be affected by it and even then only when the parties weren't keeping it hidden. Hardly anyone would even know it was happening. There are no sympathetic characters to feature on Oprah to stir public opinion. Practices that are rare and occur on the down low just don't build an audience let along hijack a culture.
Of course, that assumes that no one makes a big deal out of it and starts a war... <g>
There are people working to free up child sexuality as we speak.
Whatever might happen there, it's independent of incest.
We have a legal infrastructure to enforce laws already in place too. Nothing special required .... just enforce the law.
I assumed that you had in mind some enforcement effort to root out hidden occurrences of adult incest and prevent occurrences like we do now for kids. The current enforcement effort for kids centers around school, medical, and community where professionals are trained and alert to watch out for indications and report suspected cases to the police. If you were to do something similar for adults, there would be a cost.
But since adults would not readily show symptoms, you'd have to go further to root them out. You'd have to actively search out cases. I remember when in my state fornication was still a felony. It was not enforced. The cost of trying to enforce something like that is overwhelming. If you wanted to enforce laws against incest, you'd have to track down instances of fornication, then identify from among them those that were incestuous. The overhead of something like that would be overwhelming. Not to mention the intrusion on the privacy of myriad folks legally practicing fornication. Do we really want to spend precious resources on that? And intrude the privacy on the majority of citizens in the process? That's serious overkill, IMO.
But if an adult sells themself and becomes property freely as debtors have done for thousands of years ..
In that situation, why would one sell himself rather than rent himself? The example I mentioned yesterday where a student might contract the cost of medical school against some amount of time spent doctoring after graduation would make more sense than selling himself into slavery. Give me a reasonable example of where one might sell himself into slavery and maybe I can better address your question. |
