Laws banning incest between brothers and sisters in Germany could be scrapped after a government ethics committee said the they were an unacceptable intrusion into the right to sexual self-determination.

With traditional sexual morality discarded, the last taboo is under attack by the fairness mafia. The UK Telegraph reports:

“Criminal law is not the appropriate means to preserve a social taboo,” the German Ethics Council said in a statement. “The fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination is to be weighed more heavily than the abstract idea of protection of the family.” Their intervention follows a notorious case in which a brother and sister living as partners in Saxony had four children together. The couple had been raised separately and only met when the brother, identified only as Patrick S, was an adult, and his sister Susan K was 16. Patrick S was sentenced to more than three years in prison for incest and the couple have since failed in their bid to have the guilty verdict overturned by the European Court of Human Rights. The family was forced to live apart after the courts ruled that there was a duty to protect their children from the consequences of their relationship.

Ahem! Consequences have already appeared:

Two of the couple’s children are disabled, and it is believed that incest carries a higher risk of resulting in children with genetic abnormalities.

“It is believed” makes the risks of consanguinity sound like a superstition. Genetics has long known of the dangers, and for millennia prior, incest was understood to be a terribly risky practice. So much so that the incest taboo is considered the closest thing to a universal norm, along with the norm of reciprocity (aka, The Golden Rule) among the world’s cultures.

Of course, France abolished its laws against incest under Napoleon. France’s standing as a world power has declined for the two centuries since Napoleon, but that must be sheer coincidence, right?

The reasoning of the decision sounds like a conservative parody of a fairness obsession:

…the Ethics Council dismissed that argument [genetics], on the basis that other genetically affected couples are not banned from having children.

Cue the violins:

The Council said it based its recommendation on extensive research, in which it found many incestuous couples are forced to live in secret. In one case, it found a woman was being blackmailed by her father and ex-husband, who threatened to depive her of access to her children unless she ended a new relationship with her half-brother.

I am surprised at the reasoning, but not the result. I fully expected the challenge to come from two brothers or sisters who desired a homosexual marriage. Since there is no genetic risk to such couplings, in that homosexual unions are sterile and widely endorsed by governments in the West, my prediction was that a lawsuit would challenge the unfairness (“lack of equal protection” in the United States) of prohibiting incestuous homosexual unions.

But hey, there’s still time. This German body does not affect the United States, and its recommendations are unlikely to be embraced by Chancellor Merkel’s center-right government.

One of the aspects of Islam that receives too little attention is its endorsement of first cousin marriage, a form of incest that is less dangerous than brother-sister breeding, but nonetheless fraught with consequences. You see the prophet Mohammed married a first cousin, and his example should be followed. Ann Barnhardt explained on these pages at length in The Keystone of the Islamic Milieu: Inbreeding:

First cousin marriage for just one generation is extremely risky in and of itself. This is why virtually every other culture on earth prohibits it, and treats it as a cultural taboo. When two people come together who carry so many similar genetic alleles, the chance of an undesirable recessive trait expressing itself in their offspring soars. Now, understanding that single-generational risk, understand that Muslims have been marrying their first cousins over and over again for 1,400 years. Sit in stillness for a moment with the full, terrifying gravity of this. The Reproductive Health Journal reports the following rates on consanguinity in Muslim countries. Where a statistical range has been recorded, I have used the lower parameter: Algeria: 22.6% Bahrain: 39.4% Egypt (North): 20.9% Egypt (Nubia-South): 60.5% Iraq: 47.0% Jordan: 28.5% Kuwait: 22.5% Lebanon: 12.8% Libya: 48.4% Mauritania: 47.2% Morocco: 19.9% Oman: 56.3% Palestine: 17.5% Qatar: 54.0% Saudi Arabia: 42.1% Sudan: 44.2% Syria: 30.3% Tunisia: 20.1% United Arab Emirates: 40.0% Yemen: 40.0% Muslim men are never, ever allowed to be around, see, converse with or otherwise interact with any females outside of their families. However, they are permitted to act as chaperones for their female first cousins. If your first cousin is the only person of the opposite sex you ever get to interact with, is it any surprise that Muslims are marrying their first cousins more as the rule than as the exception? According to the BBC, 55% of Pakistani-Britons are married to a first cousin, and as a corollary to that produce "just under a third" of all children in the UK with genetic illnesses, despite being only 3% of the total births. As a direct result of inbreeding, the Muslim population is the only population on earth that is mentally and physically devolving.

I am not sure I agree on that last point. There seems to be a lot of devolving going on, considering who reporoduces and who doesn't in contemporary wealthy societies.