Civil Unions and Kissing Cousins
I don’t care what you’ve read here or elsewhere: There’s still some serious discrimination going on in the Land of Lincoln.
No, I’m not talking about poor Governor Rod, whose peers sent him up the river, or poor Governor Ryan, who is still up spit creek and being denied parole. I’m talking about love.
We don’t live in a theocracy, mister. This ain’t the Dark Ages. You should be free to love whomever you want to love. America is about equality. They used to lynch black people at picnics.
As reported in these pages last month, thanks to the Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act, a man can union a man, a woman can union a woman, and, just to be fair, a woman can union a man. (The “religious freedom” part means churches, synagogues, mosques, and Indians are free to choose whether or not to solemnize such unions. Illinois is very tolerant.) No, it’s not same-sex “marriage,” according to the state’s Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act, for that would be “contrary to the public policy of this State.” You may not use the m-word.
But the fact is, the bill Governor Quinn signed (with the exquisite short title CIV PRO-DEATH OF PARTY) provides that, for all Land of Lincoln purposes, a civil union means “the obligations, responsibilities, protections, and benefits afforded or recognized by the law of Illinois to spouses.” Furthermore, when it comes to dissolving one of them, CIV PRO-DEATH simply refers the reader or lawyer to the Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act, “Sections 401 through 413.”
So close it is in substance to the m-word that CIV PRO-DEATH’s indefatigable author and sponsor, State Rep. Greg “Crocodile Rock” Harris (D-Chicago), says he doesn’t have plans to pursue further “marriage equality” legislation. Bo and Roscoe can union each other, pass on the General Lee or Flash one to the other without a will upon a partner’s death, and visit each other in the Hazzard Co. Hospital, no matter what Uncle Jesse or Boss Hogg says.
But folks, the discrimination has not ended. Because the fact remains that Bo and Luke cannot be together—not the way two of Cupid’s victims of the same or opposite sex can, who don’t suffer from the new Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. I refer, of course, to cousin incest.
But wait, you say! That’s disgusting. Well, may I remind you that homosexuality was once thought unspeakable? That the day-before-yesterday’s taboos are yesterday’s hot topics on The View and today’s subjects for public-school kindergartners?
Indeed, why do you find it disgusting? Because that’s not your preference? Do you think that, given our puritanical society’s history of discrimination, lynching, and homocide, two male cousins would just choose to be attracted sexually to each other? Are you really going to say to another free, consenting adult that he could just as easily find another member of his own sex who is not a relative to love? Or send him to some brainwashing camp, Ted Haggard style, so they can suppress his natural desire and turn him into a suicidal alcoholic?
It’s shocking, but there it is, in black and white, in this so-called victory legislation for “marriage equality,” under Section 25. “The following civil unions are prohibited: [A] civil union between first cousins.”
So, Bo and Daisy, too.
In fact, for a certain courageous, persecuted minority, this bill is a step backward. Why? Because it’s even more stringent than Illinois law governing . . . marriage! After all, the current m-word statute provides that, while your average first cousins may not marry, they may tie the knot when they turn 50, or if either Bo or Daisy provides “a certificate signed by a licensed physician” confirming that one of them “is permanently and irreversibly sterile.”
But when it comes to civil unions, which give couples the benefits “afforded spouses,” there is no provision, no exception whatsoever, for first cousins—of the same or opposite sex.
Now, the puritans will argue that the marriage law makes sense: We don’t want to burden the state with the mutant offspring of Bo and Daisy. Fine. (Though even that should be enough to tweak the tentacles of a Planned Parenthood apologist, as it ever so subtly suggests that the purpose of marriage, at least before menopause, is the bearing of children.)
But what about Bo and Luke?
I mean, let’s face it, you don’t have to be Richard Dawkins to know that neither of those fruits, er, neither of those trees will bear fruit. So what does it hurt anybody?
That’s just not what a civil union is, you say. That is unnatural. Everyone knows that’s wrong.
Well, may I remind you that Bo and Luke don’t think it’s wrong, nor countless other same-sex cousins who are trembling in their closets, afraid of the lynch mob. And if you say homosexual-cousin incest is unnatural, then what is your standard for “natural”? Reason? Sociology? Yesterday’s consensus on what a “family” should look like? What gives you the right to define marriage, or virtual marriage, as something that excludes first cousins? Tradition? Your claim that truth is objective? Your narrow-minded, historical Christianity?
—Aaron D. Wolf
This article was first published in the September 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
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Aaron,
This was a howler. I thank you my friend. Humor may become our last refuge for sanity.
All I know is the communal marriage bed, (once called the communal waterbed back when colleges were recommending it as a kind of group therapy for those with hang ups about moral relativism) is becoming so damned crowded, it's getting where a guy can't figure out whose rump they're rubbing. I just hope I can get out of the legal profession before they all stop loving each other and start divorcing each other. For Heavens Sake!
Down here in Louisiana, two heterosexual first cousins can be married to one another; they just cannot get married to one another among us. As yet, three or more heterosexual first cousins cannot even be married to one another down here. That might come later. The law in our fair "Napoleonic" state was not always so; for I went to school with twins (male and female - I almost typed "two" twins.) who were the offspring of a first-cousins marriage. (Are they also first cousins once removed?) They were by all appearances as normal as the rest of us in our carpetbag parish, except that one of them, a clay-bottom Southern Baptist, married a Catholic. I'm not sayin' that it won't happen, but I wager that it will take yet some more time before we embrace anything that smacks of a "Union" in our climes, be that Union heterosexual or homosexual. Now, Bo or Luke could have a sex change operation, go to Texas and get married as first cousins, and come and live among us as married first cousins. Apply a little technology, do a little creative morality and bend the law a mite and you've got your problem solved.
Brilliant. A Chronicles classic. Reminds me of the old Heresies feature (my favorite). I remember reading this one in print and I'm so glad it's online now. Liberals will be sputtering for a response.
If you really want to get sick to your stomach, have a look at the comments for this article on tenured Columbia University professor David Epstein, who was arrested for having incestuous sex with his biological daughter:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2010/12/incest_is_cancer.html
Bear in mind that, Mr. Saletan's castigations notwithstanding, Epstein remains a professor of "political science" at Columbia. Although he presumably no longer writes for the Huffington Post on such topics as impugning Sarah Palin's family life.
Dr. Peters is right about first cousin marriages. They used to be commonplace, especially among the upper classes. Helped to keep the property in the right hands and the blood pure. I do not believe there is anything in Scripture that condemns it. The prohibition against cousin marriages is actually a late development, and I believe a product of the scientism of the Progressive era, not of religion. The Progressives wanted to prevent doubling up of inferior characteristics. But such unions can also, of course, double up on superior characteristics. It may indeed help account for the great outburst of brilliance in Britan from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
Jeepers, I just started reading the comments and I'm all in. Cept, my money is on my four aces. Cya soon. You guys are awesome.
It was the Catholic Church which prohibited cousin marriages. Originally consanguinity was defined as a the state of a putative couple in which the partners were related within seven degrees of kinship; later it was reduced to three or four, perhaps (not certain) due to the impracticality of verifying all seven generations AND finding an eligible bride/groom in the same region who fits the bill. I am not certain what if anything was the precedent for this in Roman law. Dispensations could be granted up to the first degree, so first cousins could in such a case marry, but not brothers and sisters.
Dr. Fleming might be so kind as to clear up my obviously sketchy knowledge of the subject, but I believe Dr. Wilson is correct in that such dispensations were granted fairly easily and first cousin marriages carried little stigma until the hygienic mania of recent centuries. It is also true that a limited amount of inbreeding within a small population can have salutary deleterious effects in weeding out bad genes. (However, the risk of crossing bad recessives grows significantly each successive generation inbreeding is practiced, so it is not a good idea to make first-cousin marriages the rule within one bloodline.)
A most amusing piece!
I noticed also yesterday that our societal collapse into sexual degeneracy revealed another hilarious by-product; it seems that a certain sperm donor - who hand-delivered his "contribution" to the front door of a lesbian pair - has been told by a judge he must pay child support for the offspring produced. It seems that one of these lesbians abandoned her playmate (how shocking!) and the partner left with the child cannot support it. Poetic justice of a sort!
I fear we will only see more of these bizarre scenarios as we tumble ever downward.
Dr. Wilson writes : ".....superior characteristics. It may indeed help account for the great outburst of brilliance in Britain from the 16th to the 19th centuries."
Professor,
A week ago I would have taken the bait and reminded you that Augustine, Bede, Becket,Carthusians of the London Charterhouse, Campion and God knows how many other Englishmen, were watering the tree of liberty long before Jefferson took up his pen to defend them. I would have reminded our dear readers that the English constellation if f indeed full of lights, both high and low, and that only recently ( say the last five hundred years ) did it become popular for "Christian tax payers" to pay for their "Christian leaders" to tell lies about their history, their admirable traditions and their true inheritance.
But as it is, knowing you as I do, and knowing you are one of the wiser and more honest men I have met in over half a century of what Okies call, "hard liven", I will let it pass and say to myself on the inside, "Touche', Clyde, I know you said that on purpose just to needle me, but let it go!". Looking at all our apostate "brothers and sisters", (such as the crooks in your neck of the woods shaking down the poor remnant of a "Christian Coalition") the baptized and apsotate Catholics in political positions using their meager powers of persuasion for the evil one ----folks like O"Reilly, Hannity, Mathews, Biden, Ryan, Pelosi, etc. etc. -----who would want to muster the strength to tell our glorious story again to the unruly mob at the door or the unwilling audience of kids who now the old defensive positions once occupied by Heroes? .
The last five hundred years of Englishmen are chumps compared to those of the first thousand. And you know it is at least partially dishonest to call the one High and the other Low when ones only task is to simply tell the truth. But as I said in the beginning, I did not come today to praise the English, but rather simply to help an honest soul like yourself, a poor man of Christ, to give our ancestors a respectful burial.
Let me end this with the oldest record we have of the last minutes on earth of just one of our English Fathers:
"The Church is not to be guarded like a Citadel and I am glad to die for God's Church. Then turning to the soldiers he said: "I command you in the name of GOD that you hurt not any of these my friends who are with me." After this he knelt down, commending his Church and himself to God , to the Blessed Mary, to St. Denis and to the other Patron Saints of his Cathedral, with the same courage that he had shown in resisting the King's execrable laws, he bowed down his head to the impious murderers,. His brains were scattered on the floor of the Church on the Calends of January ( december 29) 1171. A brilliant Englishman, indeed.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. (Should have kept it in his hand?)
A very humorous piece. I didn't know that this article was in print. I still haven't gotten around to finish the last issue of Chronicles that came out.
W.C.T. (humor?) With Jokers wild you could have five aces. If you're not sure what I mean, it's ok. Not sure either.
"I mean, let’s face it, you don’t have to be Richard Dawkins to know that neither of those fruits, er, neither of those trees will bear fruit."
Bad, bad Aaron!
Actually, what I find scary is not, as someone wrote on your wall, the cynicism, but how you manage to keep who's doing what to whom, and what name it goes under, and the legal ramifications, all straight, so to speak.
Actually, what I find scary is not, as someone wrote on your wall, the cynicism, but how you manage to keep who's doing what to whom, and what name it goes under, and the legal ramifications, all straight, so to speak.
Trying to make a catalog of sexual libertinism is really nothing more than basic combinatorics: multiplying together the number of ways different entities can express themselves and adding up all the separate combinations or permutations grouped together based on set respective numbers of entities.
Alternatively, one could list out and label each possible permutation, but that's just tedious and time-consuming.
This has been a funny column and board. That's the problem with math, you can't really get it on with it.
(Aristotle pointed that out too.)
At least he was honest. Plato was always playing jokes on us.
Anyone who frowns on cousin marriage has obviously not been watching Downton Abbey. Come on you people, get with the program. Anyone who wasn't rooting for Cousin Mary and Cousin Matthew to get together is a heartless bastard.
Incest is not a joke and we are looking at a serious problem down the road. In some cases,a single sperm donor has fathered more than 100 children (up to 400, according to one documentary). These children are usually not permitted to know the identity of the donor and therefore there is no way to check if one meets someone (online say, with similar interests, habits, appearance - not unusual even among half siblings) and ends up in a marriage.
Since I understand that young women can now sell their eggs for tuition money, the possibility also exists for full siblings ending up in a similar situation.
Reproductive technology is one of the many dangers we face and it operates mostly under the radar. I learned recently that Americans (and others) are using poor women in India as surrogates, into which are implanted embryos, carried to term in specially established dormitories, then returned here to ostensible parents. Websites in India that provide these services advertise that they are "LGBT friendly."
One could say the fruit of the tree of knowledge. We know what we can do, what we seem unable to do is to decide what we should or shouldn't do.
LHF outlines pretty thoroughly a convincing case for a wholesale ban on IVF and AI. 'Doctors' who engage in this type of behavior should be stripped of their medical licenses and permanently removed from the community they have so recklessly endangered.