SYDNEY, Australia – A judge in southeastern Australia has been partially suspended after he declared that the culture’s acceptance of homosexuality will lead to a normalization of incest.

According to a report last week from The Sydney Morning Herald, Garry Neilson is a district court judge in Sydney, Australia. In a recent sexual assault case, Neilson suggested that an adult male may not have been in the wrong for having sexual relations with his younger teenage sister over 30 years ago.

The 58-year-old man, known for legal reasons as “MRM,” has admitted to raping his sister in the mid-1970s when she was 10 or 11 years old. He again abused her in 1981, but he claims those later actions were legal because he allegedly had her consent. Judge Neilson evidently agrees.

“A jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now ‘available,’ not having [a] sexual partner,” Neilson reasoned.

According to Neilson, the man’s actions would have been considered reprehensible several decades ago, but times have changed.

“We’ve come a long way from the 1950s … when the position of the English Common Law was that sex outside marriage was not lawful,” the judge said.

Neilson further argued that the “only reason” incest is still illegal is because of the risk of genetic abnormalities in children born from such relationships. However, according to Neilson, abortions provide a solution to that problem.

“Even that [concern] falls away to an extent [because] there is such ease of contraception and readily access to abortion,” he stated.

Then, Neilson compared the increasing acceptance of incest to the normalization of homosexuality.

“If this was the 50s and you had a jury of 12 men there, which is what you’d invariably have, they would say it’s unnatural for a man to be interested in another man or a man being interested in a boy,” he opined. “Those things have gone.”

Several homosexual advocates have since criticized Neilson’s remarks, saying the comparison between incest and homosexuality is inaccurate and offensive.

“To equate homosexuality, incest and the crime of child sexual assault is as ill-informed as it is outrageous,” argued Dr. Cathy Kezelman, president of Adults Surviving Child Abuse.

On Friday, the chief judge of the New South Wales district court announced that Neilson will not preside over any new criminal cases until the government investigates his controversial comments. Brad Hazzard, the New South Wales attorney general, said people are “rightly appalled” by Neilson’s statements.

However, others argued that Neilson’s comparison between incest and homosexuality is sadly valid.

“The morality-based reasons for not permitting incest are largely the same as they were for not allowing homosexual behaviour when that was illegal,” an online commenter opined. “Yet it has been arbitrarily decided that somehow homosexuality is fine but incest is reprehensible. There is no rational basis for this belief.”

Peter LaBarbera, president of the Christian organization Americans For Truth, said the judge’s remarks are yet another tragic example of the culture’s abandonment of biblical values.

“The slippery slope of sexual perversion and sin continues to yield stunning departures from healthy, Judeo-Christian morality,” LaBarbera wrote.

Similarly, Answers in Genesis president Ken Ham wrote in a blog post that incest, like homosexuality, is another deviant sexual behavior that might soon be widely accepted.

“This news should not be a surprise to anyone!” Ham declared. “I’ve been saying for years that once you abandon the absolute authority of the Word of God, then ultimately anything goes—if you can get away with it.”

“You see,” he continued, “without an absolute authority, there are no restrictions—no absolute rules—everyone does what is right in his own eyes.”

Photo: The Sydney Morning Herald

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