[kazoolist]

At the risk of troll feeding, it's inaccurate to say state recognized incestual relationships and state recognized gay relationships are "completely separate issues."

At the heart of the moment for the later is an effort to change what the purpose of marriage is (or, perhaps, recognize a change that has already happened).

Specifically, the move to support gay marriage requires changing the idea of marriage being a relationship primarily concerned with natural procreation into one centered on the expression of romantic "love". You'll note, for instance, that Google is calling its campaign "Legalize Love".

The reason the state has opposed incest is that inbreeding leads to a much higher rate of birth defects.

But if marriage is shifted in focus from being primarily about creating an ideal situation for natural procreation to one based on "love", who is the state to say that two direct relatives are or aren't in "love" with one another?

[Nursie]

Incest 'relationships' in the real world are mostly coercive, abusive relationships. Often similar to real world polygamy where young (usually highly religious and often underage) women are married to older patriarchs and young men are shown the door.

There are reasons that some things are banned, and it's not just because of inbreeding.

[nosse]

"Incest 'relationships' in the real world are mostly coercive, abusive relationships."

How do you know? Headlines tell this?

If most incest is abusive, then why we ban that non abusive incest? With the same logic you should ban all narcotics because most of them are evil (still you can buy alcohol legally).

If LGBT and straight is ok but nothing else is not, you should be able give some waterproof arguments.