Incest in the Modern World

Wow....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6424937.stm

I'd like to draw special attention to the below statement.....

"Under Germany's criminal code, which dates back to 1871, it is a crime for close relatives to have sex and it's punishable by up to three years in prison. This law is out of date and it breaches the couple's civil rights," Dr Wilhelm said.

"Why are disabled parents allowed to have children, or people with hereditary diseases or women over 40? No-one says that is a crime."

What an interesting artical...What do you all think? Should incest be legalised? Does this man raise a point in that we are laying the law on a society which has outgrown the yolk from which it was originally constructed...there are in fact a few people on this contact list who would already have been institutionalised and/or put to death in the past on the grounds of morality or religious right!

One or two of the reasonings behind not allowing incest, although I will add now this is not just incest we are talking about, it is inbreeding too. Incest is the social term for 2 people deemed to be too closely related to have intercourse, inbreeding is the procreation of people of varying genetic closeness! Anyway the 2 reasoings would be;

It is morally wrong, this would be the result of religion rather than society. It is not just European religion but other religions that share the same belief, however before the organisation and formation of religions such as Christianity or Islam interbreeding doesn't seem to be too much of an issue. The next issue is genetics. Specifically homozygous pairing in locus. 2 identical alleles or DNA sequences at 1 position. I can't go into more detail than that at the moment, but you can read about it here;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygosity

So the reasonings I have chosen are - Genetics and Morality.

So what are the arguments against these things?

"Leavitt (1990) has argued that inbreeding in small populations can have long-term positive effects: "small inbreeding populations, while initially increasing their chances for harmful homozygotic recessive pairings on a locus, will quickly eliminate such genes from their breeding pools, thus reducing their genetic loads"

So here we have an argument that eventually, owing to inbreeding these harmful homozygotic pairings will eventually be removed, this is great of a larger scale, but not specifically for this case, as these people are the first generation to inbreed they are increasing the chances of this homozygotic pairing happening. So we can say that these 2 people inbreeding is infact placing their offspring at risk. Good, but the argument that Dr. Wilhelm produces is that if it is a simple case of genetics, then why are people with hereditary diseases allowed to procreate? As they are placing their own offspring at the same, if not similar level of risk. An interesting point.
If the argument is to be based on morality then I will draw back to where I stated that there are people on this list who would have been placed in jail and/or killed owing to their beliefs and/or practices so should we really judge these people morally based on a law that is founded not from modern themes but on historical edict?

I mean, I don't own a longbow...