The following article appeared in the Jan. 25, 2004 Sunday Visitor. Please read and add your comments.
"Sins of the Flesh: Consenting Adults"
"The libertarian argument that 'what goes on behind closed doors between consenting adults is no one else's business'--a line used to justify everything from sodomy to pornography to artificial contraception--is being put to the test in a courtroom in the German capital of Berlin.
"It seems that Armin Meiwes, 42, a computer geek from Rotenburg, had a fantasy for cannibalism. In March 2001, placing a personal Internet advertisement seeking 'a young, well-built man who wanted to be eaten,' he received a reply in the affirmative from fortyish Bernd Brandes.
"They met at Meiwes' farmhouse, where Brandes reportedly consented to allow his host to sever and fry a part of his body for their evening meal. Killing off his guest with a kiss and a knife at dawn, Meiwes cut up and froze Brandes' body, dining on his flesh for several weeks until his arrest.
"Writing Jan. 5 in the U.S. magazine City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple notes the grisly case 'raises interesting questions of principle,' because Meiwes and Brandes were 'consenting adults.'
' "Lest anyone thing that the argument from mutual consent for the permissibility of cannibalism is purely theoretical, it is precisely what Meiwes' defense lawyer is arguing in court,' Dalrymple explains. 'The case is a reductio ad absurdum of philosophy according to which individual desire is the only thing that counts in deciding what is permissible in society.'
"One wanted to kill and eat; the other wanted to be killed and eaten. The logic of 'consenting adults' would suggest that's all right.
"Or are there overriding considerations here beyond individual desire, such as respect for the dignity of the human person?"
Personally, I see a big difference in homosexuality, pornography, and artificial contraception and this case. No one is expected to give up their life in the above, but cannibalism in this case required it.
This case also brings to mind a couple of other cases involving cannibalism. What about the case of the Dahmer party in the 1800s, who were cut off from the pass into California by a winter storm? Some survived by eating those who died. And in our times, the sports team (I believe from Argentina) whose plane crashed in the Andes. Again, some of the survivors owed their lives to cannibalism. Would cannibalism in these cases be acceptable but not so in the German case? What do you think?