Posted on 04/15/2004 3:52:18 PM PDT by Graybeard58
To hear homosexual agitators tell it, same-sex "marriage" is no threat to the institution that civilized humans have reserved for one man and one woman for thousands of years. They scoff at the notion that vaporizing traditional marriage will break down barriers prohibiting unions involving multiple partners, close relatives or other species.
But the facts say otherwise. More than a decade ago, homosexual marriage was legalized in Scandinavia and now dogs are routinely sodomized in Sweden to the point where they need medical treatment. Now the same court that conjured up a same-sex marriage right in Massachusetts has ruled that sex between stepparents and stepchildren is not incest; soon enough, it may not even qualify as rape.
In late March, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled 4-3 that incest laws do not apply to a 60-year-old Dorchester man accused of having sex with his 15-year-old stepdaughter at least six times. The law specifically prohibits sex between people related by blood or adoption, the majority noted, but since the man neither sired nor adopted her, their relationship does not rise to the level of incest. State laws, the court said, "cannot be stretched beyond their fair meaning" (our emphasis).
The legislature made incest a crime to prevent the exploitation of minors by parents or their surrogates, and preserve the value and stability of families. Apparently, hair-splitting justices have never heard of common sense or common decency, but one must ask why a court known for its activism failed to apply the principle of legislative intent in a case as repugnant as this.
The defendant still faces numerous charges — rape, exhibiting a nude child on videotape and wiretapping — arising from his relationship with his stepdaughter. But if sex between a 60-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl is legal on an almost Clintonesque technicality, then what's to stop the court from invalidating the statutory-rape law on a similar triviality? In both instances, the girl is considered too young to give informed consent, yet that important legal precept is ignored in judging the incest case. In decriminalizing what most reasonable people would consider incest, the majority puts the nation on the road to legalizing sex between adults and children.
Once that barrier is demolished, it is not much of a reach to see the next step in the court's perverted universe would be to let adults and children marry. Think that's crazy? Here are the court's own words: "Because there are situations where persons related by affinity should be permitted to marry, it therefore follows that they should not be included within the incest prohibition. ... The interpretation that the Commonwealth urges on us sweeps up and criminalizes ... a wide assortment of relationships between consenting adults." And children, and relatives, and animals.
The majority, however, can't reach its conclusion without the strictest interpretation of the incest statute, which makes the contrast between this decision and the one the majority made last November in writing same-sex marriage into the Massachusetts Constitution that much more stark.
In the same-sex marriage case, the majority took activism to the extreme to make homosexual marriage a right. It wrote that "whether and whom to marry, how to express sexual intimacy, and whether and how to establish a family — these are among the most basic of every individual's liberty and due process rights." Decriminalizing sexual relationships between adults and children merely moves that agenda forward.
And it's odd, too, that while it ordered the Massachusetts legislature to codify its decision on homosexual marriage, it took a cavalier attitude toward the incest issue: "We leave it to the Legislature to expand the incest prohibition if it so chooses." That would be a fool's errand because no matter how well researched, worded or grounded, a law limiting promiscuous or immoral sex is unlikely to pass muster with majority justices.
That might not be that bad a ruling--if statutory rape with some sort of aggravating circumstance was pressed by the State instead.
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