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You should stop reading this and follow the link to Gatochy and the Exercise in Logic posting, if you've not yet read it.http://gatochy.blogspot.com/ All done reading it yet? Okay--I'll be patient.............
Ok, now that we are all on the same topic---
I posed this question to my very wise friend, Sandy. She was a BIT iccked-out by the subject--very moral is our Sandra, and very wise-- she immediately made a very astute observation: marriage between gay siblings is somewhat pointless/unneccesary. Marriage provides a legal relationship--two unrelated people become next of kin. Siblings already enjoy a legally recognized relationship-- no fears of being excluded from hospital rooms due to "not being family", as many gay couples have. I don't know enough about the legal rights/responsibilities of sibs to take this observation any further, but I think our Sandra has again shown her exellent reasoning abilities. And kudos to Gatochy (as ever) for posing the first original conundrum I've seen in memory. And I got to put the inevitable link to her page at the start of this post, instead of working out a sly way to segue to it towards the end. Speaking of sly segues-- Delta has given us a wee taste this week--jump on it!http://deltaavidelta.blogspot.com/ Hope he gives us details of his REM adventure........sigh.......REM!.........envy,envy.....enjoy yerself, boyo!
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6 comments:
I see what she means, but that's not really the point, the whole point and nothing but the point, is it? The fact is in the past it would be unthinkable for a gay couple to be publicly so, and have a ceremony of any kind where they celebrated their relationship and their commitment to each other, etc. Because society would have none of that.
The only point I tried to make was that if siblings today, at this day and age, tried to get society to accept them as a couple -- not as friends, not as relatives, but as a romantic couple -- society would not accept it because of the ancient taboo that forbids close relatives from having sex, out of fear that their off-spring might be born deformed.
And what I'm wondering is, if we could establish that their children would not be born defective; or if they could not/would not reproduce; or if they were of the same gender and therefore reproduction was not even an issue...in such a case should society change their minds about that taboo and allow them to be, for all intents and purposes, a couple?
Saying that they can visit each other in hospital without the need to get married is, quite obviously, by-passing the whole issue. Your friend is sneaky and didn't really answer your question. ;)
Good point--have to sift through the evasive answer, plus factor in social clues. Based on one person's quick reaction, and a small handful of movies (do those count?) I have to go with " no, society wouldn't accept a sibling marriage. I can only think of three films with sibling incest as a theme--"Caligula"-negative depiction, "The People Under the Stairs"-way negative depiction, and "Hotel New Hampshire"--somewhat sympathetic depiction. My data is far from conclusive--but from the "movies as cultural ink blots" position it looks like this taboo is pretty deep seated. Taboos arise in reaction to human behaviors the larger group finds threatening, so there must be a sib-incest impulse somewhere in the human psyche. I'm curious to see other folks response to the question.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against gay-marriage, but I think that marriage used to signify sexual attraction leading to reproduction (the idea of consummation etc). In this respect sibling marriage would be out of the question - ages of conventional wisdom to the biological consequences has turned into a social memetic abhorence.
I think the social stigma is just attached to the idea of siblings being sexually attracted (the tabboo, after all, would be the attraction that leads to the marriage, rather than marriage itself, or the attraction implied by marriage). Since the attraction is tabboo, it is equally socially repulsive whether it's with same or opposite sex siblings.
So (imho of course) society would reject a gay sibling marriage, because it rejects all forms of sibling (sexual) attraction.
Yes, but why exactly society rejects sibling sexual attraction is the question. You are agreeing with me when you too assume that it is out of fear of inbreeding (because, just like we both said, children who are inbred stand greater chances of being born deformed, etc.)
Seeing as sex between people of the same gender does not result in reproduction, people who are not homophobic should, in theory, not have a problem with siblings of the same gender having sex, getting married, etc. So why does the taboo persist? Should people get over it too, like they got over homophobia? Or are there other reasons for the taboo to remain?
So you didn't really answer the question, but thanks for taking the time to get in the debate. :)
Sorry, I kind of get lost in my head sometimes :)
It's possible that this is society as an entity creating an opinion from the collective opinions of individuals. You are (statistically) unlikely to be sexually attracted to your siblings - quite the opposite. You are similarly unlikely to know siblings who are attracted to each other. Your personal opinion is that it is wrong (based upon your own feelings), and no-one you know contradicts you, therefore you feel your personal opinion agrees with the consensus of the tribe, and it becomes the defacto opinion of society.
Society felt the same way about homosexuals quite recently, but exposure has changed that. In this case, exposure could alter society's view too. So a possible reason that incest is "wrong" is because it's so rare. Hmm... Hardly logical.
Incidentally, how did you know I'd posted here so quickly - is it possible to watch for comments?
Great post!
No, I type my name in Technorati once in a while, to see if there are links to me that I haven't noticed yet, and a link to your comment appeared.
http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=gatochy
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