It's not natural

Being something of a true crime buff, I've been reading some of the stories in the UK press about the trial of Ian Huntley who was recently tried for the murder of two young girls in Soham.

The Sunday Herald, a Scottish paper, is running a number of articles on the case, including one by Denise Mina, who is described as an award winning crime novelist. I don't know anything about her books, but in an article discussing the role of Huntley's girlfriend, Maxine Carr, in the crime, she notes that the defense tried to use Carr's relationship with Hunley to prove his innocence, claiming that if he had been guilty, Carr could not have a sexual relationship with him in the dayse after the murder as doing so would go against “every natural female instinct”.

[If women have a natural instinct not to be sexual with murderers, someone obviously has forgotten to tell the jail groupies who seem to flock to notorious killers here in the states, though that's another story all together.]

Mina then provides a wonderful comment that applies not only to this case, but also to other situations - such as politics - where the main argument against it is that "it's not natural":

We should be suspicious when anyone anywhere argues that anything is natural. Nature has been used to justify slavery, homophobia and keeping the working classes in their place. Appeals to nature never mean giving up penicillin or clean water, it is a hollow term that saves right-wing polemicists and scoundrels the trouble of coming up with a rational argument.