Incest: A Taboo on the Verge of Falling

Joe Carter at First Thoughts is surprised that a person could still be charged with a crime for committing any sex crime, even incest, in the Sodom that is the contemporary West. But that is a pretty jaded viewpoint (realistic, but jaded).

We should be shocked and horrified by the story of an Ivy League political professor charged with committing incest with his 24 year old daughter. The story is here:

Political science professor David Epstein, 46, was charged Thursday with having a sexual relationship with his daughter, 24.

He was arrested Wednesday morning and charged with one count of incest in the third degree at an arraignment hearing on Thursday. According to police, the relationship appears to have been consensual.

Epstein declined to comment when reached on his cell phone Thursday evening.

His wife, Sharyn O’Halloran, chair of the executive committee of the University Senate and a tenured professor, also declined to comment when reached by phone.

According to a University spokesman, Epstein is now on administrative leave and is no longer teaching students.

His defense attorney, Matthew Galluzzo, said the public should remember that Epstein has not yet been convicted.

Let's remember that he has not yet been convicted. But in the meantime, we might want to worry a bit as to whether a liberal, activist judge might not just take this opportunity to strike down laws prohibiting incest.

Once contraceptive sex becomes the norm in a society and procreation becomes peripheral and incidental to our understanding of what sexual intercourse it, then the first step is that non-marital sex is legitimated. Then perverted sex is legitimated. Attitudes toward polygamy, incest, group sex and bestiality are less negative today than they were toward homosexuality 50 years ago. The Rubicon was crossed when we decided as a society that sex can easily be detached from procreation with no negative consequences.

Natural law and reason teach us that the purpose of human sexuality is procreation and that the pleasure which is a byproduct of the act is supposed to bind husband and wife together in a permanent relationship called marriage, which is the ideal setting for the raising of children. This knowledge is available to non-Christians and is acknowledged by nearly every major religion of the world. And it is reinforced and deepened immeasurably by Biblical teaching. Christians know not only that marriage is God's plan for human sexual activity but also why this is so and the why is far more profound than materialistic atheists can imagine.

Procreative sex is personal sex. Contraceptive sex is impersonal sex. Once sex becomes impersonal then all the taboos must eventually fall. The whole Judeo-Christian sexual ethic upon which Western civilization has been built essentially boils down to the eighth commandment to refrain from committing adultery. It is the idea of marriage as the proper context for sexual activity that is the source and basis of all the prohibitions of non-marital sexual acts. They are wrong because they pervert what John Paul II calls "the language of the body, " which is to say that they are lies. They pervert the true meaning of sexual intercourse, which is personal communion between the spouses in a covenant of love designed to be the basis of the family.

Unless our contemporary society recovers a true understanding of human sexuality as procreative, personal and marital, further perversions and the gradual acceptance of ever more disgusting forms of behavior are inevitable.