In Georgia, one must be mentally competent to get married. Curiously enough, this has not stopped weddings completely.
I remember getting my marriage license and wondering, as I read the paperwork, why government ever got involved in the wedding business.
Then I paid DeKalb County $60 and answered my own question.
Maybe that's why Georgia allows cousins to get married. They don't want to run off customers.
Marrying someone more closely related is illegal almost everywhere, but an 18-year-old says that won't stop her from living with her father as his wife.
New York Magazine broke the story with the horrifying headline " What's it like to date your dad? "
The anonymous woman from the "Great Lakes" region told the magazine she was conceived on her parents' high school prom night, then raised by her mother and a series of stepfathers.
She lost contact with her dad at age 5. When she was 17, he contacted her on Facebook. They chatted online about liking "Big Bang Theory" and soon met.
Her first thought upon meeting her dad face-to-face after 12 years was "He's so good-looking!"
The woman went to visit her father, who was living with his girlfriend. They soon realized they shared a romantic attraction and moved out of the father's girlfriend's house to share a home with her father's previous girlfriend.
The father, a 37-year-old maintenance man, is just the girl's type because "he’s alternative and has piercings and tattoos."
They plan to have a marriage ceremony without a marriage license. Then, to make this story even worse, they will move to New Jersey.
As strange and creepy as all that sounds, it is not unusual for "sexual feelings" to be experienced by those reconnected with their biological relatives, say researchers, who dub the phenomenon "Genetic Sexual Attraction."
A Guardian article says "in the age of the sperm donor, it's a growing reality: 50 percent of reunions between siblings, or parents and offspring, separated at birth result in obsessive emotions" and asks "should we criminalize a bond hardwired into our psychology?"
I'm going to say yes to that one. There are many things humans are hardwired to do, like perhaps cannibalism, that have thankfully been weeded out of our behavior.
New Jersey residents are not pleased to be declared an incest magnet.
NJ.com says the " Internet is aghast " the dad and daughter plan to live as a married couple in the Garden State.
"I don't wanna live in a world where a father can marry his 18 yr old daughter yet gay marriage is a bad thing," said Twitter user Super Mal-Rio.
Yes, New Jersey bans gay marriage, but, according to NJ.com, does not have a law that bans adult incest as long as neither person is mentally incapacitated or coerced.
It's a good thing this story broke while the N.J. legislature is in session. They may be able to fix that.
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