During my time on this campus, I have heard people championing a lot of issues. Animal rights, the environment and election campaigns are among a few of them. But the most frequently preached cause is that of equality. Gender, age, sex, sexuality, religious and on and on; there is no good reason, I am told, that we should not all be looked at as equals. That is, unless you are involved in an incestuous relationship. For some reason, nobody has ever handed me a flier urging me to rethink my position on incest, or, for that matter, asked me what it is. People in the mainstream seem to be OK with keeping our laws against incestuous marriage as they are. Why is this? Because, “It’s gross,” many say. When pushed for an objective reason for the dislike of incest, the only answer I’ve ever received has been, essentially, “I don’t want a bunch of retards running around.”

On the other hand, I have been told by a professor that selective breeding of humans is unethical. Selective breeding is a form of eugenics, the blanket term for measures to control the phenotype of a population. Sir Francis Galton invented the correlation coefficient for the purpose of his other invention, eugenics. The concept caught on in America, and even overseas. By the 1930s, even the Nazis were doing it.

Certainly one can begin to see that my professor is not too far off the mark. Selective breeding seems to reek of the dark side of morality. That’s where the moral paradox arises. If the only objective reason for not allowing incest to be legalized is that the offspring will be developmentally challenged, then how is that not selective breeding? By making legislation to control the breeding of incestuous couples, we are taking a page from Hitler’s book (“Mein Kampf”) and controlling the reproduction of a certain portion of our population.

Some people would contend that anti-incest legislation is only indirectly eugenic. That it tries to uphold decency (according to the male, white, middle-class standard) first and foremost, and only coincidentally controls breeding. These people are wrong. In Illinois, an incestuous couple can get married after they reach the age of 50. This age is past the age of menopause in women that effectively removes them from the gene pool. Just because the incest occurs between two older people does not mean that it is less indecent; this law is meant to control the production of children of incest

Abortion laws are equally paradoxical. Most of the ones being passed have special clauses for rape and incest. Rape encompasses incestuous rape, so just saying “rape” would take care of all sexual assault-related abortions. Why incest? Is it such a despicable concept that conservative groups that are so backward that they comb their hair over their eyes and willing to allow abortions if it means that they can curb the incest-related developmentally challenged population? Most people are probably saying yes…

The fact is that the genetic trouble with incest is that recessive genes that would almost never be expressed if interbreeding occurred have a good chance of being expressed in the offspring of closely related parents. These genes could code for a disease or other affliction that hurts the offspring, or they could combine to give the offspring a really good advantage. For example, if there was a recessive “smart” gene, the offspring of an incestuous union could have a double dose of this gene. Incest might create the next great mind. The truth is that the idea that children resulting from inbreeding are necessarily developmentally retarded is a myth. They may be, or they may not be, just like everyone else.

Personally, I have very little personal stake in incest rights. It just bothers me to see such a blatant contradiction in opinion in such a wide range of people. It is time to decide; are you for eugenics or are you for incest rights? There is no in between.