Extreme accusations & rhetoric like this diminish real political debate over real political issues.
Dean is a non-issue at this point... he's not going to be on the ballot.
I don't have to go check with Dean to know he doesn't favor incest."
He doesn't? When is he going to sue National Review and WND for libel?
July 21, 2004, 8:28 a.m.
Howard Dean’s Incest Vote
A blast from the probable Democratic convention speaker’s past.
By NRO Staff
http://www.nationalreview.com/nr_comment/staff200407210828.asp
Howard Dean — for all intents and purposes — exited the Democratic primaries with his famous scream. But it would have been the voters who'd screamed had they known about a vote buried in Dean's lefty Vermont past — in favor of incest. Yes, in favor of incest.
The Kerry campaign is even now considering what prominence to give Dean at next week's convention. Dean, of course, has an intense following among the Democratic base, but he runs counter to the careful image of political and social moderation Kerry is attempting to project with all his might. How counter? Consider his incest vote.
In 1983, a Vermont legislator named Elizabeth Edwards introduced a bill to allow a 65-year-old woman to marry her 86-year-old maternal uncle, despite incest laws banning the match. Edwards, a Republican (only in Vermont, kids!), figured that incest laws were primarily about preventing defective offspring, and her neighbors Ramona Crane and Harold Forbes were too old to bear children. "They're a super-neat couple who don't have any money, and they just have each other, and I think they should be able to get married if they want to," Edwards told United Press International for a February 23, 1983, story.
The bill passed the state House 73-67 with Howard Dean, who was elected to the legislature in 1982, voting for the exemption from the incest laws.