Jeremy Irons in Gay Marriage Warning

In an intriguing interview last week, actor Jeremy Irons warned that laws to introduce same-sex marriage ‘could “debase” marital law and lead to a legal nightmare.

Irons told an interviewer with the Huffington Post that he feared men would begin marrying their sons for tax purposes, since the laws prohibiting incest would be hard to defend in relationships that do not (and cannot) involve breeding.

He said: “Could a father not marry his son?”

When reminded about laws which prohibit sexual relationships between family members, he responded: “It’s not incest between men”, adding: “Incest is there to protect us from inbreeding, but men don’t breed.”

The comments prompted outrage from homosexual activists.

Irons concerns are well-founded. After all, if the institution of marriage is not at least about breeding (whatever else it may be about), then why should a man be prohibited from marrying his son or his sister? Or why should a man be excluded from ‘marrying’ his brother (if he is a homosexual), or his son’s daughter (if he is heterosexual), or his husband’s daughter’s daughter (if he is bisexual)?

Incest produces genetically unhealthy children, but Tauriq Moosa at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, has already pointed out that because of contraception this shouldn’t concern us anymore. He writes:

“people claim that incest creates ‘deformed’ children…..this assumes sex acts are solely for having children, whereas this is nonsense, since we have effective contraceptives and other measures to prevent pregnancy. …why should the sexual activities of two consenting adults concern us? This is the same question we can ask those who are ‘against’ homosexuality (which is like being against having blue eyes). It is none of our business what two consenting adults wish to do (as long as no one else is harmed/involved without consent).”

Then there’s the equality angle to the whole thing. Certain adjustments to the rules about consanguinity and affinity will probably seem reasonable within a same-sex context since members of the same sex can’t produce children together. So even if you could justify a prohibition on a woman marrying her brother, this wouldn’t apply if the same woman wanted to “marry” her sister. However, once those adjustments are introduced, you would either need a two-tier system, which shows that same-sex ‘marriage’ really is qualitatively different, or else those same adjustments would have to be mapped over onto the laws regulating real marriages. After all, are we going to say that a homosexual man can marry his brother’s son but deny a heterosexual man the privilege of marrying his brother’s daughter? Are we going to allow a lesbian to ‘marry’ her ‘wife’s’ sister’s daughter but deny a heterosexual woman the right to marry her husband’s sister’s son? These are the difficult questions that few people are addressing, and we applaud Jeremy Irons for his courage to bring some of these complications to the public debate.

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