When we first heard of this Matt Bevin guy who's running against Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky Republican primary, the only thing we knew about him was that he was a millionaire, a tea partier, and the sort of person who calls Mitch Goddamn McConnell a big-government liberal. Well, now we have a deeper understanding of Mr. Bevin, and what we now understand is that Matt Bevin is kind of loony. He is apparently concerned that if same sex marriage is legalized, the next thing that could happen just might be parents marrying their children . We'll give him this much: it's a change from the usual claim that gay marriage will lead to polygamy, pedophilia, or owl-on-turtle relations, so score something for originality.
In an interview Wednesday on the Janet Mefferd Show, Bevin explained exactly how that horror show could happen:
"If it’s all right to have same-sex marriages, why not define a marriage -- because at the end of the day a lot of this ends up being taxes and who can visit who in the hospital and there’s other repressions and things that come with it -- so a person may want to define themselves as being married to one of their children so that they can then in fact pass on certain things to that child financially and otherwise," Bevin said. "Where do you draw the line?"
Now, once the interview aired, a lot of people thought that Bevin had said that gay marriage could lead to parents marrying their children, which are merely the words he said, but not, according to his campaign, what he was talking about at all, no sir, not at all:
"This is a gross misrepresentation of what Matt said," Bevin spokeswoman Rachel Semmel said in a statement. "He sees no comparison between gay marriage and incest. He was discussing the implications of the legal rights related to this issue such as hospital visitations and benefits. To imply otherwise is ridiculous."
Whew! Is that ever a relief! He was talking about platonic incest only. Now it's a perfectly logical comparison between people who have made a life commitment to each other and want the same rights and benefits of all other married people, and parents who want to commit some kind of tax fraud.
Much better.
[ TPM ]
Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. He opposes parent-child marriage because you should be free to kick your child out when they turn 18 without getting a divorce.
The specter of parents marrying their children for tax purposes has been conjured up at least twice before, by <a href="http:\/\/gawker.com\/5993713\/jeremy-irons-thinks-gay-marriage-will-cause-fathers-to-marry-their-sons" target="_blank">Jeremy Irons</a> and <a href="http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/society\/2013\/may\/21\/tebbit-gay-marriage-lesbian-queen" target="_blank"> Norman Tebbit</a>. Is this a thing amongst wingnuts?
More like &quot;If only you lazy reporters had anticipated the negative fallout from Mr. Bevin&#039;s words and taken corrective measures by writing something less accurate and more acceptable, none of this confusion would have occured&quot;.