ANOTHER VIEW ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE
Forget the Break... I'm blogging

It's almost 1am, and I'm done with my errands for the day so I decided to quickly put up some articles I've been meaning to post. Probably no commentary or short essays. Just posts, which some friends have complained about lately since I don't write my random essays on life lately. Oh well.

These United States
Will same-sex marriage lead to incest and polygamy? Let's hope so!

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BY JULIA GORIN
Monday, April 26, 2004 12:01 a.m.

Proponents of redefining marriage to include same-sex unions dismiss as alarmist the concern that it will set a precedent for incest and polygamy. But progressives and traditionalists alike should see the social advantage of the not-too-distant eventuality of all such unions--and mandate them.

For example, the number of single-mother homes could be greatly reduced if a woman were simply allowed to marry her son (a Jewish mother's dream!). Otherwise, we might suffer the fate of Sweden and Norway, where gay unions have been legal for a decade and today out-of-wedlock births are at 60% and single motherhood, with its accompanying poverty, has risen. If our society doesn't take the social experiment to its logical conclusion, then women and children, whom marriage protects, will become victims.

Same-family and multispousal unions (but please, don't ignorantly equate one with the other) can play a key role even in traditional family configurations, as when the man of the house dies and leaves an inheritance to a widow who eventually dies herself, leaving the kids to pay taxes on the estate. If, however, a widow were allowed to marry her son upon her husband's death, the death tax could be avoided, since spouses are immune. And if there is no son but only a daughter, same difference. In fact, there would be nothing to keep a widow from marrying all her kids.

Meanwhile, with the gap in the ratio of women to men ever on the rise, especially with more and more American couples adopting unwanted female babies from China, the redefinition of marriage will enable women to have enough kids of both sexes to be able to pair them up with one another, ensuring that every girl gets her man. Not that the uneven female-to-male ratio would have any ramifications for this brave new world. Perhaps the greatest societal benefit will be a decrease in the divorce rate. It's a lot harder to leave your wife when she's your sister. Blood is thicker than water.

Polygamy will be further instrumental in solving the phenomenon of the noncommittal male--an extravagance that a female-dominated populace can ill afford. Polygamy will encourage the confirmed bachelor to commit at last, leaving him no excuse not to tie the knot with all the women he's keeping on a string.

In India, polygamy has already spared one woman from a very lonely life. The Associated Press reported late last year that an Indian man married two sisters, one of whom is in a wheelchair. He had asked the father of the brides for the healthy sister's hand in marriage, and the patriarch insisted that he also marry the handicapped sister so that she could be guaranteed lifelong care.

It may all seem far-fetched, but last week the San Francisco Chronicle reported that "Unitarians from Boston to Berkeley," acting under the aegis of the Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness, "have opened another front in the . . crusade to expand the definition of marriage and family in America," insisting that "their relationships are at least as ethical as other marriages--gay or straight." And consider the following from Reuters in Paris last January:

A man who had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister may not adopt the child they had together, France's highest appeals court has ruled.

The 13-year-old daughter, Marie, lives with the couple and knows they are siblings. . . . Marie's father wanted to adopt her to 'regularise the situation.' He got the backing of a lower court in 2001, but the ruling [by the appeals court] overturned that decision. The court . . . followed a request by public prosecutor Jerry Saint-Rose to uphold "the universal ban on incest, which has always been a fundamental pillar of society."

What makes this case freakish, aside from a Frenchman intimating that there is actually such a thing as a "fundamental pillar of society," is that another Frenchman is trying to do the right and socially responsible thing by normalizing "the situation," but is being prevented from doing so. Even though everyone knows that kids do better psychologically and emotionally when their parents are married.

We mustn't be as wrongheaded as France. The usual argument that even the most progressive-minded folks offer against incestuous unions is that the children who result have a higher risk of birth defects. Yet the child in question already exists and is reportedly healthy, thereby negating that argument--a discriminatory argument that, no one ever points out, implies that the handicapped, deformed and mentally disabled are undesirable. Besides, if handicap is the issue, it must be stated that the law does not restrict retarded or genetically handicapped citizens from marrying and having children.

Indeed, the law doesn't even restrict citizens from purposely breeding handicapped children, as two deaf lesbians living in Bethesda, Md., did. According to a 2002 BBC report, Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough went to several sperm banks, looking for a donor who suffers from congenital deafness. After being turned down by all, the couple came to a friend who had five generations of deafness in his family and who himself had no hearing but did have sperm. He had already been a donor for the couple's daughter, born five years earlier, who is "profoundly deaf and able to communicate only through sign language."

Echoing sentiments by gay-rights activists that being gay is the same as being black, McCullough compared being handicapped to being black: "You know, black people have harder lives. Why shouldn't people be able to go ahead and pick a black donor if that's what they want?"

Meanwhile, the practice of sperm donation has already crossed incest lines. Two women, one British and one French, gave birth to their brothers' babies in 2001. Being infertile themselves but wanting to continue their genetic lineage, the women were implanted with zygotes composed of their brothers' sperm and eggs from outside donors.

Further, according to Britain's Guardian newspaper, the phenomenon of sperm donating contributes to "genetic sexual attraction," a force society mustn't underestimate:

You're 40, happily married--and then you meet your long-lost brother and fall passionately in love. This isn't fiction; in the age of the sperm donor, it's a growing reality: 50% of reunions between siblings, or parents and offspring, separated at birth result in obsessive emotions. Last [April], a former police officer was convicted of incest with his half-sister--but should we criminalise a bond hardwired into our psychology?

So to ensure that redefining marriage solves as many problems as it may create, it must be an all-or-nothing proposition. Why leave it to a slippery slope to decide? Lawmakers should rewrite the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment to mandate every kind of union imaginable. We've already come such a long way since the scandalous days of Florence Henderson dating her TV stepson. Why stop now?


Ms. Gorin is a comedian touring with The Right Stuff and performing in Republican Riot, a monthly stand-up show in New York. She is also an Election 2004 comedy correspondent for America Online's ElectionGuide04.com and a contributing editor of JewishWorldReview.com.