Troy Jackson, Maine’s new working-class Democratic candidate for Senate – following Graham Platner’s demise – has PR problems. Cockburn thinks it’s a case of #MeToo going a little too far. While Platner was on Kik posing in a towel and supposedly sexually assaulting his ex-girlfriends, Jackson was doing the honorable thing – pairing off with his cousin. The level of concern we are seeing over this simple fact is a case of parasocial hysteria. Who cares if Troy is dating, and has two children with, his second cousin? So did FDR.
Well, that was his fifth cousin, but still. Though Jackson and his cousin Lana never wed, cousin marriage isn’t even illegal in Maine and for good reason. Troy Jackson is from a town of 250 people. He’s a logger. Do you people want authentic candidates or not? Do you want people starting stable families or not?
The reason there’s a birth rate crisis is the same reason no ordinary people are in the Senate. We live in a country of sterile prudes who won’t let people marry their coworkers, or their friends’ exes, or anyone they have any likelihood of meeting. When cousin marriage was outlawed by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, huge swaths of people were unable to marry, because they’d be excommunicated for marrying anyone they knew. Average marital age for women climbed to their mid-late twenties. Besides, as one prudent leader once noted, “The Targaryens wed brothers and sisters for three hundred years to keep bloodlines pure.”
