Defining Deviancy Down in Germany

Germany's equivalent of the United States Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court, ruled on Tuesday, February 19, 2013, that homosexuals in civil partnerships have a right to adopt children previously adopted by the other person in the partnership in the same manner as married husbands and wives. Previously homosexuals could only legally adopt a partner's biological child. This additional legal erosion of the distinctions between families resulting from a husband-wife marriage and homosexual living arrangements has all too predictably called forth yet more demands to break down the nuclear family unit.

The German Green Party youth organization (GrüneJugend or GJ) immediately commented upon the court's decision with a press release posted on the organization's website. The alternative-leftwing GJ predictably welcomed the court decision with the comment that questions of adoption "should be determined through multiple sensible factors," to which "sexual orientation, however, certainly did not belong." While only secondary adoption was under consideration in the recent court decision, "it clarified nonetheless, that the disadvantaging of non-heterosexual persons will also not be sustainable in pure legal terms."

Yet GJ made clear that its demands went beyond legal equivalence between homosexual with heterosexual couples. The GJ "also demanded the possibility that a child can be adopted from more than two persons. For on the one hand the child profits legally. On the other hand the reality is taken into account that many children are already raised by not merely two persons."

GJ's call for multiple parents for a child would seem to entail ultimately the possibility of these multiple parents to also enter multiparty living arrangements. Thus the conservative German website Politically Incorrect (PI) noted that GJ was preparing the way for social recognition of polygamy and other multiparty relationships such as polyamory. This development was particularly problematic for Germany with its large Islamic immigrant population originating in a culture still accepting of the ancient institution of polygamy. Once same-sex marriage (SSM) breaks the natural ties among husband, wife, and their children underlying the definition of marriage, there is no logical reason to reject other romantic relationships among adults. This trend already feared by conservative scholars like Robert George in the United States is coming likewise to fruition in Germany.

If acceptance of polygamy were not radical enough, voices from GJ and the Green Party itself have in the past extended their understanding of the sexual revolution to calls for legalized incest. The Augsburg chapter of GJ (GJA) condemned on its website on July 12, 2012, a European Court of Human Rights decision of the preceding April 12 upholding a German ban on incest (Section 173 of the German Criminal Code) as an "extremely negative development." A spokesperson for GJA, Marie Rechthaler, bemoaned that the "state intervened massively into the private life and the right of self-determination of its citizens with the prohibition of incest. In the process the state completely contradicts the scientific facts!" "This prohibition," Rechthaler added, "is based solely upon obsolete societal taboos and is not rationally sustainable."

Another spokesperson for GJA, Katherina Stephan, added that "with this uncourageous decision we are thrown back by years." The abolition of Section 173 was "long overdue." Stephan demanded that "Germany must finally legalize love!"

GJA followed in the path of Green parliamentarian Hans-Christian Ströbele on April 13, 2012. The 72-year old Ströbele, a member of Bundestag's legal committee, declared that "two grown persons should be able to decide themselves whether they have sexual intercourse with one another -- provided, they love each other, it occurs voluntarily, and there is no dependency relationship." Ströbele argued that objections to incest due to its hereditary harm for children were not unique, as individuals suffering from hereditary diseases were free to engage in sex outside of incest. Ströbele also noted that cultures such as the Aztecs and ancient Egypt had prescribed incest.

Such is the result of the abandonment of Judeo-Christian, natural law-based norms of human sexuality. Societies such as Germany are risking going back to a future combining the historical novelty of SSM with relapses into sexual and lifestyle practices long considered abandoned in the distant past. The leftist vision of historical Progress thus ends in regression. Lost in this sexual and social anarchy will be the stability of the family unit, the incubator of human life for the next generation and basic building block of a stable society.

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