Enjoyment and Contemplation

Hot Air headline: “German thought leaders move to legalize incest”

The German national Ethics Council has taken a vote and is suggesting that it should be legal for brothers and sisters to marry. (From Metro UK)

Incest could be made legal in Germany following a meeting of the national Ethics Council.

They have called for the legalisation of incest after looking into the case of a brother and sister who had four children together.

Gross.

The blogger HBD Chick (not a Christian, for whatever it’s worth) has often argued (e.g., here and here) that the church in Europe is what convinced everyone to stop marrying their cousins, and that this outbreeding trend became part of the foundation of our modern respect for individual rights, love for our fellow man, and Western civilization itself.  To the extent that Nazis in Germany or racist Southern Democrats in America wanted to go back to marrying only within your “tribe” at some level, arguably they were cutting against the grain of the last two thousand years of social development—not to put too fine a point on it!  Obviously the Nazis are no longer current, but if Germany is thinking of reversing the original cultural and legal proscriptions on marrying your siblings, I suppose it’s as fitting an epitaph as any for the decline of the West.

See also Mark Steyn (as always!) for other current reflections on Nazis and Western decline.