RE: Mother and son in New Mexico face jail time for incestuous relationship
August 10, 2016 at 4:37 pm
(August 10, 2016 at 4:30 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote:(August 10, 2016 at 4:22 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: Can you support this with hard data in the form of numbers? If you're going to say "far more likely", I'd like to see percentages, myself.
I was scanning some studies and for it to be a real problem you need a sizable population to be engaged in inbreeding, not just individuals. It could be a justification of that law, it's not hard to imagine a religious community that maintains inbreeding as a practice, considering all the small Christian (and other) cults that have had strange sexual practices in the US. A group of 100 starts inbreeding legally on a religious basis, and you are going to have children with defects. Without an inbreeding law, such communities would be legal. I don't think the legality of inbreeding real has much of an effect on people who want to fuck their siblings, parents or children on an individual level anyway.
No doubt -- laws aren't preventative, they're punitive. And I think you and I would agree that even if such a law did prevent these things, it still isn't the government's place to regulate this sort of thing; as others have pointed out, the gov't doesn't regulate other unions likely to produce birth defects.
But -- when I see the term "far more likely", I like to calibrate that judgement for myself. I know the logo behind the argument, but I want to see data that supports it.
