Jeremy Irons identifies one of the many problems with legal homogamy:
Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons was today embroiled in an extraordinary row after he suggested that same sex marriage could lead to fathers marrying their own sons to avoid inheritance tax. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Mr Irons made a series of highly inflammatory statements and even denied that such a union would be viewed as incestuous as ‘men don’t breed.’
Hey, if nothing makes God happier than when two individuals – as we were informed with great emphasis, ANY two individuals – love each other, then they should be able to “marry”, right? Are a man and his son somehow not included in “any”? Or a mother and her daughter? Grandfather and grandson? I’d always assumed that the primary problem was that once it is decided that marriage could not longer be limited by sex, obviously it could not justly be limited by quantity either. But, as Irons has correctly perceived, merely removing the sex limit is sufficient to produce a truly perverse set of incentives.
After all, if we are to accept the idea that homosexuality is no longer immoral, what grounds do we have for not similarly declaring incest to be morally acceptable as well. The homosexual lobby has not answered this question with anything but rhetoric and faux outrage, mostly because they have no answer for it.
The fact is that two men or two women cannot ever marry because marriage is a particular relationship between a man and one or more women. The various governments can pass all the laws declaring fish to be fowl they like, but the chromosomes remain. Government didn’t create marriage. Government doesn’t define marriage.
The state is going to have to get out of the marriage business if it doesn’t wish to impair the institution entirely. I note that already, in British Columbia, the government has resorted to imposing marriage on the cohabitating because so many men are now actively avoiding it thanks to previous state interventions. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if the more intelligent homosexuals, especially of the male variety, eventually come to regret their campaign to mock the institution when they find themselves being “married” against their will by the state.
In fact, under the BC law, many college roommates would find themselves inadvertently married, having passed the required two-year cohabitation limit.