Kentucky Lawmaker Aims to Legalize First-Cousin Sex

I've mentioned before my childhood in Allamakee County, Iowa. I had a great childhood: thousands of acres of woods and fields, mile after mile of trout streams, the Mississippi just a few miles away. But back in those days, Allamakee County also had what they called "The Families." (When people mentioned them, you could hear the capital letters thudding into place.) These were three big families, who I won't name, but who controlled a great deal of the prime dairy farmland in Allamakee County — and who had been intermarrying since before the Civil War. It's not a stretch to say I went to school with some funny-looking kids.

So you readers can appreciate how bemused I was to see that a Kentucky lawmaker is trying to get first-cousin... relationships legalized in The Bluegrass State.

Republican Kentucky state Rep. Nick Wilson sponsored House Bill 269 to redefine sex with a first cousin so it would no longer qualify as an act of incest, according to the Kentucky State Assembly’s website.
The bill removes “first cousin from the list of familial relationships” defined as unlawful incest in Kentucky, the website explained. Incest would also be downgraded from a Class C felony to a Class D “unless it is committed with a person who is less than twelve years of age.”
Kentucky law currently states that a person is guilty of incest if they have sex with any person known to be “his or her parent, child, grandparent, grandchild, great-grandparent, great-grandchild, uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, brother, sister, first cousin, ancestor, or descendent,” according to Newsweek.

I'm pretty sure Kentucky has some bigger fish to fry — as in, all the time.

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Seriously, Rand Paul, Mitch McConnel, someone, anyone, please take this guy aside and give him a damn good talking to. It doesn't take a great imagination to figure out how Democrats will use this as a talking point to deride Kentucky Republicans as crazy rednecks. It's already happening:

Wilson’s bill has been widely criticized on social media. New York public defender Eliza Orlins blasted the proposed incest law as “truly insane” in a nearly two-minute TikTok video, urging Kentuckians to “flood his office” with phone calls.

Besides all that, there are good biological reasons why incest is a bad thing, not least of which is the harmful possibility of reinforcing recessive alleles that can be damaging. That's not to say it hasn't been practiced; in ancient Egypt, the nobles married brother to sister to ensure "pure royal blood." (Cleopatra was married to her brother before her dalliances with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.) The Hawaiian alii (royals) followed the same practice and got away with it by ruthlessly destroying any infant that was born with any noticeable disability.

Let's not even get started on the Hapsburgs.

It's hard to see a purpose for this. Does the Kentucky Legislature have any process to discipline a representative for wasting everyone's time? Were I to have the chance to ask Kentucky Rep. Nick Wilson about this, I guess my first question would be, "At the end of the day, what are you really trying to accomplish here?"