18-Year-Old Plans to Marry Her Father

I’ve been seeing a story floating around recently on Facebook.  Apparently, there’s a young girl who reconnected with her mostly absent father.  After doing so, they discovered a mutual sexual attraction which they chose to pursue.  They will eventually move to a state where incest is legal and marry.

The common reaction to this is that it’s “just gross” or it’s “wrong.”  I’m not seeing anyone bold enough to affirm it, even among a crowd who is quick to affirm other kinds of non-traditional sexual relationships.  Thus far, any possible approval is only held in timid silence.

The daughter gave an interview where she lays out her story in detail.  In it, she’s offered some of the following rationalizations for her attraction and life choice.

• We love each other
• It’s consensual
• We’re adults
• I just don’t understand why I’m judged for being happy
• It’s more common than you think
• Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA) is a real thing… people need to research it because they just don’t get it
• I’ve never felt comfortable with another man
• I’ve never been in a more passionate, loving, fulfilling situation
• Everybody just needs to deal with it as long as nobody is getting hurt or getting pressured

The problem for those troubled by the story is that in order to sustain your objection you will have to reject each of the above rationalizations.  In doing so, you invalidate them for any other sexual interest group who also choose to employ them, and we’ve certainly heard them from the homosexual community.  If these points fail for one group, then they fail for all groups.  Any prevailing support must rely on some other consideration(s).  This means that such rationalizations are ultimately meaningless.

But if these points hold for one group, they hold for others.  If you accept them from gay advocates, then you must consider swallowing your objection to this incestuous relationship (and, by the way, to polygamists, who use these defenses as well).  Any overriding objection must be based on something that supersedes these “valid” rationalizations, but that implies these points — even if supportive — are not in themselves adequate.

The bottom line is that either these justifications are like moral pixie dust that sanctify any persons who can employ them, or they are of little to no consequence in the debate — any real justification requires something deeper.  Or, perhaps it requires no justification at all beyond, “this is what we want to do, reason be damned.”  That makes it nothing but a popular preference issue, with legal rights as the only concern.  Curiously, few go here and prefer, instead, to make a moral case for themselves, no matter how thin.

We are moral creatures through and through.  But if there is a moral component to sexuality at all, then perhaps there is a way that sexual relationships ought to be.  Ah, but there’s the rub; for if that is so then there is a line over which it is possible to step, even while uttering defenses like those used by this young lady.  That implies that no matter how you feel or love or consent, you could be wrong to pursue a thing.