If This Was the 1950s

Australian judge says incest may no longer be a taboo, reports the Daily Telegraph, and the judge argued the sexual relation of a brother and sister wasn’t unnatural because:

“If this was the 1950s and you had a jury of 12 men there, which is what you’d invariably have, they would say it’s unnatural for a man to be interested in another man or a man being interested in a boy. Those things have gone.”

I would have thought that a man being interested in a boy would still be considered unnatural. Slippery slope arguments don’t always work, but as in this case it is clear that some morally insensitive people will take the approval of one thing formerly rejected as a reason for approving something now generally rejected.

Though fortunately others are not so coarse as this judge (Gary Neilson, as he ought to be named). The crown prosecutor was appalled, especially by the judge’s assertion that the availability of abortion helped make these relations all right. An advocate for children quoted by the newspaper “said incest was horrific, regardless of the ages of those involved. ‘The relational betrayal of the horrors of incest between a brother and sister of any age is abhorrently criminal,’ she told The Sydney Morning Herald.”