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Now Blogging Afresh at Ad Orientem 西儒 - The Western Confucian



Monday, September 19, 2005

A Choreographer Asks a Question I'd Like to See Answered
From Bill T. Jones Is About to Make People Angry. Again.*:
    In part of the performance, for instance, a voice is heard reading from Leviticus ("Do not have sexual relations with your father's sister," "Do not have sexual relations with the daughter of your father's wife"), a selection intended, Mr. Jones said, to prompt his secular audiences to ask themselves why it is that they abide by certain biblically derived proscriptions on sexual conduct while maintaining that others have no validity. Here he is involved in an act of self-interrogation as well. "Why do I think it's O.K. to lay with another man," Mr. Jones pondered over the phone one day, "but not to sleep with my sister?"
Why?

"This primitive taboo against incest," the secularist will confidently begin to answer , "is merely a result of the backward eugenic methodology of earlier, unenlightened times. Genetic engineering will soon allow incestuous couples to have perfectly healthy babies. In the meantime, the eugenic problem can be overcome by sterilization and contraception. If a slip-up occurs, abortion is always a solution. And any fetal matter that makes it to full term and is accidentally delivered can be euthanized on the spot. Science and technology have all the answers. There is no reason siblings should not marry. Anyone who rejects the normalcy of such relationships is a judgmental troglodyte, a Bible-thumping bigot, an intolerant incestophobe!"

Atheist Isaac Asimov described such an incestuous utopia in his The Robots of Dawn.

* Use BugMeNot.com to circumvent NY Times registration requirement.