Incest, Christianity and "Family values"

Pedophilia is easier to prosecute than incest, even though incest has been shown to be more damaging than pedophilia. Everyone is expected to hate someone who rapes other people's children; whereas fathers, uncles and brothers who commit incest are protected by the family and frequently the community. Which means that the greater crime goes unprosecuted, whereas the lesser crime is reliably prosecuted.

One major way in which the victims of incest are told to be silent is through the Christian claim that everyone is a sinner and that everyone should forgive. Yet this argument is not applied to keep a man whose wife overcooked dinner or had a beer with her neighbor from assaulting or persecuting her. Forgiveness is demanded of the children and wives, but not of husbands. This hypocrisy then masquerades as family values or Christianity and seeks to impose itself upon everybody else.

In fact, it is neither family values nor Christianity. Family values demand that the man be a gentleman in how he deals with his wife and children and not only not rape them but also not batter them. As for Christianity, it is meant to apply to everyone, not just to children and wives. If you believe that everyone must forgive, this applies also to husbands in case that their wives or their children have done something they do not approve of. And if it is not used to apply to the men, then it has no business being applied to anybody else either.

On a related matter, a lot of Christian-influenced people believe that woman should submit to the man. This empowers only the worst among men. A good man, especially a genuinely Christian man, will recognize that any person - including himself - is capable of sinful and wrongful choices, and that any next person - including his wife - is capable of rightful ones. Only a creep will demand unconditional submission to his every whim, and Christianity is not meant to be a creed that empowers creeps. It is meant to be a creed that teaches goodwill, humility and compassion; and that means recognizing one's capacity for error and the next person's capacity for rightfulness. This not only applies to one's next door neighbor. This also applies to one's wife.

The demand that everyone live in patriarchial nuclear families is not even Biblical. Most Biblical figures (such as Abraham, David and Solomon) either had any number of wives and concubines, or (in case of Jesus, Paul and the prophets) were never married. In two situations in the Bible, prostitutes - Rahab and Mary Magdalene - played positive roles. Also in the Bible is the recording of a black queen Sheba also playing a positive role. The demand that everyone live in violent, incestuous, racist Southern Baptist families is not even true to the Bible; and it is outrageous that people of America - the land of the free - be subjected to such a demand.

And what is more outrageous still is to see people who are proponents of such situations claiming that they represent morality, values or America.

I say this as a straight married man and a father. I say that I, as a straight married man and a father, have no use for such institutions and such beliefs. A good father, and a good husband, does not demand submission. He earns the love and respect of his wife and children instead of beating them into fear. And the man who does not want to go to the effort to so has no business exercising paternal or marital authority.

Many of the people involved in right-wing anti-government activism claim to do it for sake of freedom, but the reality is quite different. The freedom they want is the freedom to beat their wives and to rape their children while retaining the loyalty and submission of both. They are against the government because the government has taken an interest in their special little activities. And their course of action has been to corrupt the government to the point that, instead of prosecuting their special little activities, it now attacks the women and children who are reporting them.

The people who are proponents of these activities claim that they are the basis of the society. Any argument to that effect is a con. What people claiming such things seek to do is exercise unelected, unchecked, unbalanced and unaccountable authority that, lacking check and balance and accountability, has nothing to keep it from becoming tyrannical and corrupt. And most communities in which such people gain dominance do in fact become tyrannical and corrupt. 

Tyrannical and corrupt enough to commit and hide incest.

Tyrannical and corrupt enough to rape and batter wives.

Tyrannical enough to commit these and greater abuses and claim that they speak for values, for tradition, for Christianity or for America - and, if that was not bad enough, to attempt to force their brutal and corrupt ways upon the rest of the world.

I believe that America is too good a country to go the way of these scoundrels, and that most American people are better than them. The same is the case with Australia, which appears to have followed the same trends.

It is time that these and related rackets be seen for their true character, and that people free themselves from them and operate from the standpoint of transparency and goodwill.