Those who insist that the aforementioned examples are just sporadic rants of an unorganized lunatic fringe would do well to remember that the homosexual movement began in a similar fashion. They should also heed the fact that we are not dealing with mere basement-dwelling bloggers. We are dealing with people who can shape cultural and legal climates; think-tanks, government advisors, filmmakers, political commentators.

Recently the Scottish parliament announced it would consider a measure born of a petition from a man that is calling for the overthrow of laws that are “breaching the rights to sexual autonomy for all consenting adults that is accepted in other more developed countries.” In a world that is increasingly embracing gay marriage, this would be par for the course. Except the petition was not talking about anti-gay laws. It was not even talking about anti-polygamy laws. It was talking about laws against incest.

What’s more is that the logic behind the man responsible for the petition is very familiar.

Public fears, prejudice and bigotry about ACI [Adult Consensual Incest] are mostly due to ignorance created over many years mostly by the church and church-influenced governments and newspapers,in much the same way as public fears and bigotry about homosexuality were created.

The Scottish Parliament will no doubt reject the request to legalize incest. Furthermore, apologists for gay marriage will be quick to point out that one random person using the legalization of homosexuality as precedent to legalize incest is not enough to vindicate the warnings of people of faith who said that gay marriage would open the flood gates for other behaviors.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the legalization of homosexuality has been used to justify incest. The truth is there has been a growing campaign from the legal, academic, and cultural nerve centers of society to push for the legitimization of incestuous relations for years.

As early as 1984, Carolyn S. Bratt of Kentucky University was calling for the legalization of incest based on the Loving v. Virginia decision, which declared marriage to be a fundamental right. The gay rights activists used this same argument for their cause.

In 2010 political science professor David Epstein of Columbia University was convicted of conducting a three-year consensual incestuous affair with his twenty-four year old daughter. Matthew Galluzzo, his lawyer,argued “It’s ok for homosexuals to do whatever they want in their own home. How is this so different?” Galluzzo later doubled down saying,

In 2003, the Supreme Court…declared that constitutional right to engage in sodomy in the privacy of his own home, and that public opinion about the morality of such conduct was no longer a valid basis to deny…that liberty. In the dissenting opinion, Scalia countered that as a result of this logic, there is a very valid argument…that there is now a constitutional right to engage in acts of consensual adult incest. That is the argument that I am now making on behalf of my client”

Recently, during a case involving a man charged with repeatedly raping his sister, Australian District Court Judge Garry Neilson compared incest to homosexuality, saying that it too could be eventually accepted as the norm. He suggested that the risk of genetic abnormalities, which he said was the only reason it remained illegal, could be bypassed with the “ease of contraception and readily access to abortion.”

In 2014, the German Ethics Council recommended that the government abolish anti-incest statutes. “The fundamental right of adult siblings tosexual self-determination is to be weighed more heavily than the abstract idea of protection of the family.”

Academia also has a record of calling for the legalization of incest using the same arguments the gay rights activists once used.

Bioethicist Jacob M. Appel, whose writings have appeared in the Journal of Clinical Ethics, the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, has advocated for the legalization of incest and bestiality. “The state has very little interest controlling what people do in their own private lives in their own bedrooms unless it directly and negatively affects other people in a tangible way.”

Debra Lieberman, an Assistant Professor in the Adult and Health department at the University of Miami, is on record of saying that “My bottom line is this: consensual sex between two adults should always be legal, sibling or otherwise.”

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