I recently found a Google /Usenet Group, which is often puerile and occasionally enlightening. I got a little bit carried away by the great questions emananting from the fact that Siegmund and Sieglinde were siblings yet conceived and bore Seigfried, who subsequently promised himself to Brunnhilde who was the half-sister of Siegmund and Sieglinde.
Incest is, arguably, the very last taboo in our society. Nobody talks about it. I'm sure if you were bring it up at the dinner table, outside of very specific contexts such as the Ring of the Nibelung, you would be shunned by polite society.
When I was a councillor, a couple came to my surgery asking for assistance in obtaining a housing transfer. Nothing unusual in that. What was unusual was that they wanted to transfer from a three bedroomed to a one bedroomed flat. That should normally be straightforward, and is often accompanied by a cash incentive. However, there was a stumbling block. Housing were being deliberately unresponsive.
The reason was the couple's children had been taken into care. As far as Housing were concerned, this was probably only a medium term measure, and therefore, it would be a misjudgement to move them to a smaller flat, where they would then be overcrowded. However, the couple - who actually struck me as being very pleasant, nice, if a bit simple - said cheerfully to me "They're in care and we don't want them back..."
It takes a lot to shock me but I was quite shocked by that. And, as this post perhaps testifies, I am haunted to this day by that case. I later discussed it with my mother, a professional social worker, now retired, but then she was working for her Local Authority.
Instantly, she said to me "Are they brother and sister?" As soon as she said that, my instincts told me that they were. Plus the fact that one of them had said "We were in care -in a children's home". Then, thinking about it, I wondered - based entirely on prejudice, by the way - whether they themselves were not the product of inbreeding.
To this day, I wonder why the children had to be taken into care. My mother - admittedly old-school, trained in the 1950s - gave me the impression that she took it ot be inevitable that children be taken into care. Of course, for all I know there may have been other abuse/neglect/ issues, but it's not uncommon throughout the Western World to take such children into care. This actually goes against the modern philosophy to try and keep the family together unless the children are actually At Risk.
We've all met people as we go through life that we are convinced are inbred (and I don't just mean the British Royal Family and half of Jerry Springer's guests), and we snigger (to ourselves, of course...). I just wonder whether it is a self-perpetuating taboo, that we shudder when we think of it because we are conditioned to, but actually, it's no big deal..
BTW, I'm neither advocating nor condoning . Frankly, the idea of having relations with even 'legal' relations leaves me entirely cold.
Incidentally, an advert on the site is "Test for paternity before the child is born. Lord Chancellor approved." I never knew that was possible. Must be a new development. It's gonna put the kybosh on a lot of Springer/Trisha-type TV shows...
