Who doesn’t love a baby with seven toes and a tail?
The question may seem silly, but a friend pointed out to me last week that you can legally marry your first cousin in nearly half the states in this country.
Surprised? I was.
The first thing that jumped to my mind was, “Can you legally marry your first cousin in more states than gay marriage is legal?”
Turns out the answer is yes.
You can legally marry your first cousin in 18 out of the 50 states with no exception, according to CousinCouples.com, a website which helps facilitate consanguineous marriages. You can marry your cousin with certain exceptions in seven other states.
So let’s see if my math is correct (and it most likely is since my parents are not cousins). There are 18 states that allow cousins to marry with no exceptions, plus the seven states that allow cousins to marry with a few exceptions equals 25 total states — half of the country.
But this is probably the backwards half of the country, right? Certainly this is not happening around the great state of Louisiana.
Louisiana, along with every state it borders, does not allow marriages between cousins. However, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee do. You know, the weird half of the Southeastern Conference.
Some of the restrictions to consanguineous marriages are that couples must agree not to have children or must submit to genetic counseling before having kids.
While cousins may be able to marry each other in half the country, same-sex marriage is only legal in seven states, including Washington, D.C., according to NPR.
Let me reiterate, marriage between cousins is legal in half the country, but same-sex marriage is legal in a mere seven states.
Does anybody else see the incongruity here?
The moral and upright conservatives of this nation will argue that we must protect the sanctity of marriage from being defiled by the homosexuals. I call bullshit.
Marriage is no longer sacred. Half of all first marriages end in divorce, along with 67 percent of second marriages and 74 percent of third marriages, according to the Forest Institute for Professional Psychology in Springfield, Mo.
I don’t get it anymore. Nothing is sacred about marrying your first cousin and having a merry gang of offspring that strangely resemble the victims of Chernobyl.
It doesn’t make sense. The whole argument about keeping a pure bond of mutual fidelity strictly between a man and woman is, for lack of a better word, retarded.
If you want to marry your cousin, go ahead. If you want to marry your same-sex partner, why not? How can the government tell me whom I can and cannot marry?
Conservatives are afraid the earth will somehow shatter if gays are allowed to marry freely like the rest of the nation. Let me enlighten you: Homosexuals are everywhere. They already have sex, live together and love each other — all they are missing is that magical piece of paper that ties them together in the eyes of the law.
The world will not end if gay marriage is legalized everywhere. I promise.
So let’s allow individuals to exercise their freedom of choice as Americans and marry the person they love — simply because it’s the right thing to do.
 
Parker Cramer is a 20-year-old political science junior from Houston. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_pcramer.
 
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Contact Parker Cramer at [email protected]