Not a Human Right
A man from Leipzig went to the European Court of Human Rights to argue that laws against incest violated his right to privacy and family life. He and his sister had been fucking for years. Whenever he wasn’t in prison for it. They had four children together, two disabled—the biological consequence you learn about in ninth grade when you first realize why it’s forbidden.
His lawyer apparently made the case that his client’s sexual drive was so powerful that the law was unjust. The court disagreed.
I never had siblings, so incest has always been this theoretical thing, something that lives in pornography and true crime documentaries. Online, the fantasy is transgressive and electric—taboo made sexy, the forbidden packaged for consumption. But the actual case, the real people and their disabled kids and the repeat prison sentences, the relationship just slowly deteriorating—it’s just wreckage. The videos made it look like something it wasn’t.
What gets me is his certainty. He didn’t hide it. He went to court. He fought it publicly, knowing exactly what everyone would think of him. That kind of conviction about wanting something that badly, refusing to accept the world’s answer—I don’t know how to think about it.
The court said no. Not a human right. That was the end.