Who Decides, And Upon What Do They Base Their Decision

In case anyone failed to notice I haven't posted anything in a while. That's because I haven't been in the mood for public display. Also, I haven't had anything even I thought was interesting to say.

I was inspired to write an erotic love-making scene this morning. Not sure if "love-making" is a proper term, considering the relationship was incestual. Not sure why I was inspired to write about incest. That's one of life's miseries to which I have not been subjected to.

Perhaps it's because I have been thinking hard about a world, or reality, if you will, in which many of our current moralities do not exist. What are the moral reasons for refusing to allow siblings to marry? Biologically, we know brother-sister unions are frought with the risk of congenital disorders in the children, particularly as they affect the brain. Where I grew up there was a family which kept mostly to itself. There was a mother, father, and two children: boy and girl. I never saw the father, and only vaguely remember the mother, but both the children were - and forgive me, because I do not know the proper word for it - retarded. Or something like it. They had great difficulty in learning and were placed in a special education classroom with others of a like sort. Back then we hid people like this away, so the so-called normal people wouldn't have to look at them.

The parents were rumored to have been brother and sister. I don't know if the rumor was true, but even adults persisted in it. Adults who seemed to know them. There were a LOT of first cousin marriages in the area. (If you're wondering, my parents were not one of these pairs. We had emigrated to the community from someplace else.)

I will say that the community's overall academic level was pitiful at best. It took virtually no effort for myself and my siblings to rise to the top of our grades - grade wise.

But if the danger of birth defects could be overcome - would it still be immoral for siblings to marry? And what about gay and lesbian relationships? Until such time that our science improves sufficiently, two women are not going to produce a child. Neither are two men. So would it be immoral?

For those who say all forms of GLBT are abnormal I suppose so. But we're learning new things about that all the time. Even from a religious perspective.

But even people who turn their backs on conventional religion generally are not in favor of sibling marriages. Why? Beyond birth defects, is there a reason? What is morality anyway?