Back in 1967 Pierre Trudeau, then Minister of Justice in Canada, made his famous statement “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” Taken literally, of course, it’s a silly comment; there are many bedroom activities, from molestation to mayhem, in which the criminal law, and thus the state, has every place. But the matter at hand was a bill decriminalizing certain sexual behaviours between consenting adults, so we all know what he meant. Regardless how offensive we might find it, no sexual activity between consenting adults should be a matter for the criminal code.
Today, most people in Canada would probably affirm this view as far as it went in 1967, but time marches on. A few weeks ago I heard, on CBC radio, a discussion of incest; not the ugly child molesting kind, but that between consenting adults. They pointed out that consensual incest between adults is not a crime today in Spain, Portugal, or the Netherlands, and it has not been a crime in France for 200 years. In Norway siblings are permitted to marry and Romania is considering following suit. So check out the podcast "Decriminalizing Incest"
Perhaps I’m just getting jaded in my old age, but I must confess that I’m taking things in stride much more than I used to. Though I do think we’re headed for disaster, it’s much easier to watch when you don’t feel responsible to fix, tend, explain or account for it all. These days I’m rather like a country boy who finds himself trapped on a runaway munitions train in downtown Toronto. It seems that I should bury my face in my hands, but instead I just gawk in wide-eyed amazement. Would never have imagined in a million years that a hayseed like me could end up in a big accident like this.
What do you think?
1 comment:
I wonder if we might think of this not so much in terms of whether incest is right or wrong, or a good or bad idea, but in terms of what we should expect from the law and from the state. What role ought the state play in enforcing sexual morality? And are the coercive institutions of the state effective ones in enforcing this morality? And if the state is given the responsibility of enforcing sexual morals, can we trust it to back the right ones? In this way the issue might be parallel to that of established religion. It isn't that religion doesn't matter and the individual choice of a religion is arbitrary or trivial and it isn't that no one can know what the right religion is, but since we can't trust the state to back the right religion, we try to keep the state, and its monopoly on coercion, out of the religious realm as much as possible. So perhaps it would be better for the state to focus on protecting the vulnerable, such as children, rather than weighing in on what consenting adults can and can't do. The prohibition of incest seems to be almost, if not completely, universal but, I suspect, has mostly been enforced through social stigma and ostracizing transgressors. Decriminalizing incest wouldn't stop this from occurring. So the question is, are the state's institutions the proper one's to use to prevent incest?
Nathan
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