Matt Walsh at The Blaze is quickly becoming a favorite writer. He lays down logical progressions with scorching sarcasm. He’s done it again here on the topic of “marriage” as it is now defined, which is to say, not at all. As I wrote in my previous post, the Supreme Court’s majority decision in Obergefell was a Hallmark card without a limiting principle and it was clear to anyone with eyes to see that there would be spectacular backfires in its wake, and here we are again.

Enjoy.

If All Love Is Equal, This Incestuous Mother And Son Couple Should Be Celebrated

Matt Walsh is a blogger, writer, speaker, and professional truth sayer.

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Another dispatch from Sodom. The Daily Mail reports on the controversial romance of a New Mexico couple who reconnected after many years apart and fell instantly in love upon meeting again. It would be like something right out of a fairy tale, if not for the fact that the two lovebirds are related. Not just related, but mother and son.

If you’re currently in a place where it would be inconvenient to suddenly start projectile vomiting all over the walls, I’d advise you to refrain from clicking the link I provided. The story is dark, twisted, and stomach-churning. It’s not necessary, nor medically recommended, that you read all the sordid details yourself.

In an act of heroic self-sacrifice, I already endured the whole article so that I could give you a summary. It goes like this: The mother, Monica Mares, gave up her son, Caleb Peterson, for adoption when she was 19 and he was a baby. Their paths crossed again some 20 years later, and soon after that fateful reunion they decided to strike up a sexual relationship. Incest is still illegal in all 50 states, so one or both of them may wind up in prison for several months. They’ve now taken their plight public in hopes of rallying the most progressive and fearless members of our tolerant society to their defense.

They make a strangely familiar case. They say they are in love. They say their love is just as loving as anyone else’s love. They say they aren’t hurting anybody. They say they’re consenting adults. They say this is none of the government’s business.

They even have the requisite sciency-sounding name for their lifestyle choice. They claim they’re experiencing “GSA,” which stands for “genetic sexual attraction.” As everyone knows, any fetish is automatically legitimate if it can be turned into an acronym. And there’s another name, too, because just one creepy euphemism isn’t sufficient anymore. Incestuous couples are members of the “consanguinamorous” community. There are many consanguinamorous folks who want to have sex with their brother/sister/mother/father/uncle/etc., and, as the reasoning goes, if a lot of people wish to do a certain thing then that thing must be OK, even natural.

Gee, where have we heard these rationales before?

The article kindly provides a reminder to anyone who needs it. An incest activist (yes, those exist now) by the name of Cristina Shy is interviewed about the Mares case. Shy is in a relationship with her half-brother, and, ironically, does not seem very shy about it. She now spends her time campaigning to see that her particular brand of deviancy is normalized and accepted in the mainstream. Shy may be severely deranged both mentally and spiritually, but she does make a pretty salient point here:

‘Our whole community is watching this case and looking for updates. It needs to be brought to the attention of everybody in the country and people need to start thinking differently. It was the same with gay people just a few years ago and now they can get married they are accepted. Well why not consanguinamorous people like us? We are all adults. We are not pedophiles, there’s no domestic issue. We are in love, we want to be together but we are related. That shouldn’t be a deciding factor.’

It’s consensual, it’s not hurting anyone, and we’re in love. If that was good enough for gay “marriage,” why isn’t it good enough for a brother and sister or mother and son? On what possible basis can we exclude poor Monica and Caleb if, on the strength of these very same arguments, we have declared gay “marriage” an immutable human right endowed upon creation by God Himself?

It certainly seems that these justifications apply to both in equal measure. Let’s go through and test them out:

1. It’s consensual.

Nobody denies that two adult men can indeed consent to “marry” each other, but can we deny it in the case of Monica and Caleb? He’s 19, she’s 36. They have agency over their own bodies. Their reunion happened when the son was a legal adult. That means they both made their own choices, God help them. Nobody was forced into anything. There was consent, without question.

When applying this logic consistently, it becomes immediately apparent that consent is not enough to morally or even legally justify something on its own. Our culture says that as long as two people want to do something, then it must be OK. But we see that just because a mutual agreement has been reached does not, in and of itself, mean that whatever was agreed upon is good or ought to be legal.

If mere consent were enough, then the three sickos arrested a few years ago for digging up a corpse to fulfill their necrophiliac fantasies ought to be given a presidential pardon. Sure, their victim didn’t consent, but she wasn’t alive. All of the living participants consented, yet the act was still illegal. Why? Well, we can come up with some peripheral reasons — you can’t trespass at a cemetery, for instance — but the real reason, beyond any other, is that it’s just plain wrong. Morally wrong. And despite all of the half-baked protests against “legislating morality,” almost everyone still agrees that in some cases a thing ought to be illegal primarily because it’s immoral. That’s what it means to be human beings living in a civilized society.

This is the main reason why incest between adults is illegal: it’s wrong. Debased. Animalistic. Revolting. Even the most libertarian minded person in the country probably isn’t too upset about laws against incest. And whatever practical reason they offer for their objection, the real reason, even if they won’t say it, is that they find it perverse. And sometimes that’s enough. Or it used to be.

2. It’s not hurting anyone.

Yes, incestuous couples have a much higher risk of conceiving babies with birth defects, but contraception and abortion are also legal. Moreover, our laws say that an unborn child is not a child while it’s still in the womb. It’s precisely in this stage of development that the non-child child, if he were conceived and allowed to live, would develop. Whatever harm done to a person would therefore occur at a point when the person isn’t a person. So that argument goes out the window.

Besides, gay sexual relationships between men are physically harmful and are much more likely to lead to any number of diseases, not to mention the psychological effects manifested in sky high rates of depression, suicide, and drug abuse. If that doesn’t count as “hurting anyone,” then surely incestuous relationships cannot be said to qualify, either.

It could be argued — accurately, in my view — that aside from the birth defects, legalized incest would hurt society by fundamentally perverting the institution of the family. Yes, people who harbor incestuous fantasies may act on them regardless of the law, but it would be incredibly damaging for the State to officially declare, “OK, the relationship between son and mother, brother and sister, uncle and niece, is now a legitimate forum for sexual exploration. Also, you can get married. It’s all good! Nothing matters!”

That sort of declaration would (further) undermine and subvert the family, which would indeed be quite harmful. But again, we’ve been told that it doesn’t matter if something harms society or the family. All that matters is how the people directly involved in the act feel about it. If that’s the logic, then Monica and Caleb are good to go.

3. Love is love.

This is really the whole crux of the thing. It’s the reason why the Supreme Court decided to pretend that a right to gay “marriage” was embedded mysteriously into the Constitution. Love is love. Two people have right to love each other. All love is equal. All love is the same. Nobody’s love is better than anyone else’s, and so forth.

As the love struck Caleb put it: “This is about whether I have the right to love someone. And I sure as hell have the right to love Monica. You can’t tell people who to love or who not to love.” Just replace “Monica” with “Maurice” or “Michael,” and the left would consider his argument bulletproof. If we must accept and legitimize all love, how can we possibly deny young Caleb? He does love his mother, that much is clear. Too clear, really.

Now, I happen to believe that they’re expressing their love in a severely disordered way, and that their particular brand of love should not be turned into a legal institution, nor should it be considered a good enough reason to allow the institution of marriage to include mothers and sons. Yes, they love each other, and nobody has ever said that a mother should not be allowed to love her son, or that a man should not be allowed to love another man, but some of us have said that those kinds of love should not be expressed through sexual intercourse and they cannot be fortified by the covenant of marriage. The maternal love from mother to son is beautiful and good, just not when it’s turned into a fetish. That has been the logic, anyway, but it’s no longer available. We’ve been informed that love is love is love is love is love. If that’s all it takes for Adam and Steve to get married, why not Monica and Caleb?

If you accept the progressive premise in the former case, you cannot suddenly abandon it in the latter. It makes no sense. You’re being intellectually dishonest, and you know it.

Of course, these are not the only rationales offered for gay “marriage.” There are others:

I was born this way.
I can’t choose who I love.
It’s [current year]!
I have a right to be happy.
I should have the same right as people who do not share my proclivity.
This kind of sexuality exists in the animal kingdom.
Don’t be narrow minded.
Stop judging.
Stop imposing your religious beliefs on me.
And so on.

Under each argument, right down the line, without exception, Monica and Caleb qualify. As do folks in the bestiality and pedophile and polygamist communities. A slippery slope? No, there is no slope. It’s a straight plunge into the abyss. ”Traditional marriage” was a separate and distinct thing, and could be justified using arguments that don’t apply to anything but itself. It existed on hard ground and was built on a solid foundation with walls and a roof and everything else. Once you tear all of that down and dig out the ground from underneath it, the descent into utter madness and depravity is inevitable, sudden, and unstoppable.

Progressives spent decades calling the slippery slope argument against gay “marriage” a fallacy, so they are now reluctant to admit that everything conservatives said in that regard was plainly true, and will soon come to fruition. But they’ll be less bashful about it as time goes on. In fact, some have already grabbed the dynamite and tried to blow open the floodgates.

Slate ran an article not long ago calling for the legalization of polygamy. A college professor from New York released a book recently, offering a “philosophical analysis” of adult-child sex. This is another in a long line of progressive attempts to not-so-subtly normalize pedophilia. Time Magazine posted an editorial several years ago asking whether incest should be legal. And, always on the forefront of liberal lunacy, Canada was told by their Supreme Court a couple of months ago that bestiality is permissible, so long as there is “no penetration” involved. Sadly, as far as I’m aware, nobody has come to the defense of our necrophiliac friends yet, but I’m sure they’ll have their time in the sun soon enough (although I suppose they’d prefer to operate at night).

This is why conservatives, what few still exist, cannot afford to compromise or give up ground. When you forfeit the truth to appease the mob, you will never get it back. If you relent and concede that the truth does not matter in one case, how can you expect to suddenly assert its authority in another?

It may be too late to win the gay “marriage” argument now — at least for a while — but we cannot give up making the argument, however fruitless it may seem. If we do, then we will not have it available to us when the left comes knocking with pleas for polygamy, pedophilia, incest, and whatever other twisted horror they can conjure in their heads. It’s clear that once they argued for one perversion, they really argued for them all. And so we must argue against them all, or else we have not really argued against any.

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