This Does Not Constitute A Couple

Call me a prude but I still this there is something wrong with this. It's just nasty!

Straight from the scary fairy tales of once-upon-an-adoption comes the story of Patrick Stuebing and Susan Karolewski, a brother and sister, who fell in love, had four children and now are fighting the German courts to overthrow its brother-sister incest law. As reported Wednesday by the BBC, the couple describe themselves as a "normal couple" who just want to have a family and live without discrimination. Stuebing already spent two years in jail for committing incest, and he'll get thrown back into jail for another sentence if the current incest law stands. Three of the couple's four children have been taken into foster care.

Now, maybe I'm becoming a reactionary scold in my approaching dotage, but the couple's relationship doesn't sound terribly normal, nor even, perhaps, consensual. According to the article, Stuebing, who had been adopted by another family, found his biological family at the age of 23, when Karolewski was 15. After their mother died six months later, the couple fell in love and began living together and popping out babies at a prodigious rate of four in six years. OK, vive la différence and all, but people! That's a 16-year-old living with her 24-year-old brother and pregnant most of the time. Ech.

But it's not as if they don't have a case. Incest laws around the world vary widely, though the practice is illegal in most countries. In Germany, sex with a relative still constitutes a criminal offense, punishable by up to three years in prison. But in neighboring France, Napoleon abolished incest laws in 1810, and recently Japan, Argentina and Brazil legalized it. The United States still criminalizes incest and many states still outlaw kissin'-cousin incest as well.

So a long lost brother put the moves on his baby sister and folks wanna call it a love affair and not statutory rape. This is some nasty isht!