Rick Santorum Was Right About Incest and the Slippery Slope

Dr. Michael Brown

In April 2003, Senator Rick Santorum stated that, “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.” For this he was mocked and vilified. It turns out he was right.

In my last article, “Here Comes Incest, Just as Predicted,” I pointed to a small but growing societal trend towards the acceptance of consensual, adult incest, especially when these unions do not produce children. I had already written about this in 2011 in A Queer Thing Happened to America where I warned that, “The trajectory is all too clear!” Others, of course, have differed with that assessment.

Law professor Courtney Megan Cahill, writing in the Northwestern University Law Review in 2005, described Santorum’s remarks as, “One of the more infamous slippery slope arguments in recent memory.”

Andrew Sullivan, writing in The New Republic, heaped scorn on Santorum’s reasoning: “If you want to argue that a lifetime of loving, faithful commitment between two women is equivalent to incest or child abuse, then please argue it. It would make for fascinating reading. But spare us this bizarre point that no new line can be drawn in access to marriage—or else everything is up for grabs . . . .”

According to Dahlia Lithwick, writing in SLATE in 2004, “The problem is it’s virtually impossible to debate against a slippery slope. Before you know it you fall down, break your crown, and Rick Santorum comes tumbling after.”

So much for taking Santorum (and before him, Justice Antonin Scalia) seriously.

But what is undeniable now is that more and more people, gay and straight alike, especially among the younger generation, are realizing that the same arguments that support homosexual unions also support adult, incestuous unions. (This applies especially to cases when the incestuous union is between two men or two women, where the possibility of children born with genetic defects does not exist).

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