No no … not same-sex love.
This is the other love that dare not speak its name..
Sexual relations between siblings or between parents and their children are forbidden under section 173 of the German criminal code and offenders can face years in prison.
But on Wednesday, the German Ethics Council recommended the section be repealed, arguing that the risk of disability in children is not enough to warrant the law and de-criminalising incest would not remove the huge social taboo around it.
The chairman of the council, Christiane Woopen, was among the 14 members voting in favour of repealing section 173, while nine people voted for the ban to continue and two abstained.
A statement released on Wednesday said: “Incest between siblings appears to be very rare in Western societies according to the available data but those affected describe how difficult their situation is in light of the threat of punishment.
“They feel their fundamental freedoms have been violated and are forced into secrecy or to deny their love. […]
In a statement outlining its recommendations, the Ethics Council said the law against incest “put couples in a tragic situation”.
“The majority of the German Ethics Council is of the opinion that it is not appropriate for a criminal law to preserve a social taboo,” it added.
“In the case of consensual incest among adult siblings, neither the fear of negative consequences for the family , nor the possibility of the birth of children from such incestuous relationships can justify a criminal prohibition.
“The fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination has more weight in such cases than the abstract protection of the family.”
Wow, don’t those arguments sound … you know … familiar.
in the future you’ll be able to go to germany and make sex with people in your own family and sample lots of different beers and take a cable car up the Zugspitze
Can’t they just leave it on the books and just not investigate/persecute/prosecute anyone? Seems hard to prove anyways.
Positive law is a floozy and she can’t help it. Heck, she can’t even recognize it, and yet still she wants to be King.
We need to allow these people to get married. After all, love is all that matters.
Oh, and speaking of matter in motion, today’s APOD depicts a spectacular bit of it.
But remember, there’s no such thing as a slippery slope, and the domino theory is mere paranoia.
C’mon guys, it’s not as though Germans have no moral standards! After all, they were at least discussing regulating their bestiality brothels a while back. Does anyone know whether they actually did or not?
Nah, they just reclassified them as zoos — or, in German, Tiergarten.
Hey, wait a minute, then what’s a Kindergarten?
But remember, there’s no such thing as a slippery slope, and the domino theory is mere paranoia.
Where activism exists, it’s not a slippery slope: it’s a pair of skis tied to a snowmobile. Whole different kettle of fish.
The comments at the Independent are a hoot. “Delusional” doesn’t begin to describe it.
(That rag is even further Left than the Graun, in case anyone didn’t already know that.)