Unknowing twins married

It's come out in the British House of Lords that a pair of twins, who didn't realize they were siblings, were married. Once the couple found out how close they really were, the marriage was annulled. The matter was discussed during a debate on the legislation surrounding human fertility and embryology. From CNN:

"They were never told that they were twins," (a senior British lawmaker) said during the Dec. 10 debate... They had been adopted by separate families and "met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation."

No further details about the couple have emerged, and it is not known when the marriage took place or how long they were together before they discovered the truth.

Adoption groups said Friday the case proves the need for openness and transparency during the adoption process.

Link (Thanks, Mark Pescovitz!)

• [Takuan]

  True enough, what about the rights of the exceptoin to the rule?

• [Jeff]

  It’s like a Heinlein family saga, but it’s not hot.

• [Antinous]

  Many queers don’t find it particularly odd to get it on with amenable siblings. Is inbreeding that big a risk that the heterosexuals need a law to prevent it?

• [AahMyEyes]

  If this story is true, it’s not like they are really brother and sister. I think that if two kids who were not genetically related but brought up as brother and sister got married it would be more “disgusting”. Being a sibling is more than mere DNA.

  So what? They share a bunch of chromosomes. Like the one poster said, they should just run with it. They weren’t raised as family, they are not, for all intents and purposes, family.

• [Michae W. Dean]

  “The girl that I miss is just me in a dress”.
  –Bomb, “Spoked Feet”

• [Jeff]

  I know some gay twins, guys, and they do seem to enjoy each other a little too much. Humans are very complex and no one seems to have a monopoly on functional relationships. Unrelated people have messed up kids all the time, why not let Sis and Bro makes some more dumb humans?

• [Cpt. Tim]

  at that point i’d say fuck it.

  you’ve taken it that far already. Deal with it. Adopt if you want kids.

• [CitrusFreak12]

  Yikes, that sucks.

• [error404]

  Well, contrary to popular belief the lielihood of bith abnormalities from a sibling pregnancy are quite low.

  Obviously this is dependent on the grand parents and great grand parents not having “rolled their own” as it were.

  I think it is unfortuneate but no big thing really.

  Ok legally their marraige has been annulled, I’ll come back to THAT, they should just continue as before. They love each other and are very CLOSE.

  I don’t think that the marriage should be annulled, as it is not their fault,the adoption procedures and the law is at fault, and should be modified after this case, but to simply recind a wedding seems unfair.

  They should be allowe dto adopt too, hell it they were both adopted so they should have no difficulty on that front.

  Hell, it’d be a family tradition!

• [Man On Pink Corner]

  Reminds me of the plot of Sally Beauman’s Destiny, circa 1988. Destiny was the first novel to earn a million-dollar advance for a previously-unpublished author. It was the only romance novel I’d ever read, and I read it only because I was curious to see what it took to break into the business with that kind of bang.

  Destiny turned out to be 1,000 pages of surprisingly-well-crafted potboiling, leading up to a climax where a wealthy bachelor-of-the-year type marries the Perfect Woman from the Wrong Side of the Tracks who turns out to be his sister. Our hero isn’t the sort who can let things slide, so he kills himself quite dramatically.

  The message I took away from Destiny — besides the realization that there had to be an easier way to make a million dollars — was, “Don’t sweat the small stuff. And it’s all small stuff, even when you accidentally nail your own sister.”

• [Bonnie]

  I’ll keep the Luke and Leia jokes to myself…

• [Johnny Cat]

  I mentioned this to my co-workers today when I saw it, and got a lot of lukewarm stares. This is some weird territory for office talk, for sure. The unknown question on everyone’s lips was not spoken, and I’m glad.

• [strathmeyer]

  BoingBoing is now passing on stories made up by the British House of Lourds? How royal!

• [cr0m]

  I’ll bite. What’s the question on everyone’s lips?

• [Takuan]

  should incest be illegal? I mean if it is consensual
  and there is no medical complication inflicted on offspring,(perhaps by not having any), where is the harm?

• [alisong76]

  The same thing happened in New Zealand a few years ago, and they’d had children together. They were forced to divorce. I’m not sure what happened after that, but come on, I mean, the kids already existed, the deed was done. What harm could have come of them staying together, had they wanted to?

• [Antinous]

  Is it time for incestlols yet?

• [creesto]

  Antinous, you sound like you were posting the ‘queer’ comment from experience and/or preference. That’s cool, but you may wish to temper your language: when I read your first post (#21), I was ready to drop the Bigot Hammer on you, but further reading (#31) indicated you weren’t one, and yet further exploration (#35) indicated you have an irreverent sense of humor. < >

• [cr0m]

  @21 I have *never* heard that. What’s your source?

• [help i cant comfirm my username themelonbread]

  star wars

• [Georgia Tills]

  As long as they don’t have children, I don’t see anything wrong with it. Incest is wrong for two separate reasons;

  1. Genetics
  2. Family structure

  Those two have been raised separately, and hey, since they are twins, they are the same age, so even though they know they were born siblings now, neither have any older authority over the other.

  Just get fixed, both of them, just in case.

• [Antinous]

  Im in ur blog comments
  Disruptin ur preconsepshuns

• [Antinous]

  Teresa,

  That seems weird to me, but I do get the feeling that there aren’t a lot of my tribe commenting on BB. If anybody had googled ‘antinous’, that would have set them, er, straight.

• [Crash]

  It seems like the only source for this story is Lord Alton mentioning it as part of a speech to the House of Peers. Has anyone corroborated it?

• [Cpt. Tim]

  #23

  its the “anything anecdotal said about homosexuals must be true” law. Republican political pundits invoke it all the time.

• [flipa]

  Crash, I’m thinking nobody could if they wanted to. This is a politically motivated leak from a judge to a politician with the aim of changing the law; confidentiality stops the judge from discussing the case in public. The only directly involved people who could do that are the family.

• [flipa]

  Alisong76, the NZ case sounds cruel, but couldn’t the couple stay together despite the forced divorce? As long as they’re both allowed to be the legal guardians of their kids, and they’re considered each other’s next-of-kin (as brother and sister instead of husband and wife) – is there a reason why things couldn’t go on as they were? (Apart from, of course, the kids going through hell at school, if this was a public case.)

• [chasuk]

  There are a lot of couplings which might be unwise due to known genetic risks, but we don’t interfere. To interfere because of a familial relationship is absurd. Love conquers all, remember? What it doesn’t conquer can be handled via vacuum aspiration or D&C.

• [Village Idiot]

  No worries, inbreeding is how we get championship racehorses.

  It must’ve seemed too good to be true, I mean look at how much they have in common! Even the same birthday! It must have seemed like some kind of omen, and I guess it was. Now it’ll probably be some kind of TV miniseries.

• [Halloween Jack]

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_sexual_attraction

  More common than you’d think–there are online forums for people trying to deal with GSA. Also read about the Westermarck effect in the above link for an explanation of the incest taboo and its real origin.

• [gerta]

  @38, While this story is almost certainly false, it still seems worth noting that the risk of birth defects from sibling pregnancies are by no means overstated. Humans genomes carry a remarkably high number of very nasty recessive genes. For example, ~1 in 25 people of northern European ancestry carry the cystic fibrosis allele, and that’s just one of many such rare diseases. Siblings are a full 50% related, and their offspring 25%. For each of those rare recessives residing in mom or dad, and accounting for how our chromosomes get allocated, you’re looking at a 1 in 16 chance of the birth defect. Compare that with a ~1 in 200 chance for CF if one of your parents is a carrier and you hook up with an unrelated northern European (less still if you connect with someone from different ancestry). Between mom and dad, you can expect at least a few such genes to be lurking, and genetic screening can only nail down those we’ve previously identified.

  For cousins, the case is arguably exaggerated, since you’re only 12.5% related, cutting the risk four-fold compared to siblings. But it’s important to understand the science before proclaiming incest is a strictly social taboo — it seems quite plausible that the social intolerance for incest has very practical roots.

• [Georgia Tills]

  re#23

  Ancient Greece, where homosexuality is not taboo, doesn’t discourage relations between brothers in blood or arms either.

  Homosexual sex produce no children, hence it nullifies the genetic argument against incest. There is still the complication of family structure though, which is why it must be strongly discouraged among those raised as /siblings/.

  Frankly, the whole Woody Allen marrying his adopted daughter thing is more disturbing than the twins in this story. It doesn’t matter if she was adopted, Allen was in a position of power and trust and he abused. Sometimes young people with a disturbed past might make sexual advances, or rather, tolerate sexual advances, to the first consistent person that have shown them love, having not known the parental variety. It is the duty of the conscientious mentor to refuse and reaffirm how the love given is familial.

  Interesting Note: Homosexual coupling during adolescence, between close and distant members of a pod, functions to reduce competition for females before they are ready to have youngs of their own.

  Since human family units aren’t like pods, incest again, heterosexual or homosexual, is a bad idea among people raised as siblings. Now that gender roles are comparatively less defined, and friends of same-sex and opposite sex marry each other, the sibling remains the only constant you can talk to about the person you are involved with.

• [Takuan]

  Ditto on the power thing. Power must be equal.

• [Michael Canfield]

  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I politician relating an anecdote to perfectly illustrate the need for some legislation he wants doesn’t qualify. At this point, I’m not buying it.

• [Laurie Mann]

  I’m with Michael – I suspect this is an urban legend. While members of the government in Britain tend to be slightly more reality-based than their US counterparts, most of them don’t let the truth get in the way of a “telling example.”

  The incest laws are pretty strongly rooted in many religious traditions, but I have to agree with the other posters here – it’s a whole different situation with consenting adults, particularly if they aren’t planning to have kids.

• [Georgia Tills]

  Added Note:

  Pods of Dolphins, I forgot to add, dolphins.

  Eyebrow Raising note: Dolphins are also a species noted for some of their attempts of copulating with humans during their randier moods…

  (Knowing that, certainly made the Darwin Awards entry about the guy who jumped in with the killer whales extremely interesting. According to the marine handlers, the killer whales wasn’t trying to find the guy, who was found naked, it was just trying to play…)

• [jordan]

  Gawker seems to agree with #14…

• [dannysland]

  Memo to Lord Alton: You can’t make policy based on something that previously happened only once… a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

• [Antinous]

  @ #23, #25 and #28,

  I just know a fair number of guys who have slept with their brothers and cousins. Unless you live in a big city, it’s a lot harder for queer teenagers to find (unremunerated) sex than it is for straight ones, so we take what’s available. Plus we’re not so likely to be saddled with conventional sexual morality. I confess that if a guy told me that he had slept with his sister, it would creep me out. If he told me that he had slept with his brother, I’d ask if he had pictures.

• [js7a]

  Telling adoptees the names of their mom and dad is just good policy. What if they need a bone marrow transplant, or a kidney down the road? The option should at least be open.

• [slida]

  This story is apparently complete crap, made up by a politician to gain further support for a bill he was trying to get passed.

  http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDBlog=21

  Of course there is no way to know for sure, but I find bloggers to be at least slightly more credible than politicians.;)

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  Pink Corner (4), Dannysland (17): It’s not just Star Wars and Destiny. Having lovers belatedly find out they’re brother and sister is one of the all-time great plot cliches. Seriously — I remember as a kid reading a Mad Magazine piece on old-movie cliches, and that motif was prominently featured. The thing has its own section in the motif index.

  I know of two traditional ballads that use it (“Babylon” and “The Bonny Hind”). It turns up in the Kalevala, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (Arthur and Morgause), J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Tale of the Children of Hurin (Narn i Chîn Húrin), John Sayles’ Lone Star, Dryden’s The Spanish Fryar, Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, Plautus Shevelove Gelbart and Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and innumerable less celebrated works from Mother Bombie to Lethal Weapons of Love and Passion.

  If half-siblings count, the real thing has to be happening a lot more often that anyone knows. Unless you keep women under lock and key, the rate of “paternal discrepancy” or “misattributed paternity” is estimated to be somewhere between three and twenty percent, depending on who you believe. Some of those undeclared stepsiblings have to be hooking up with each other.

  Takuan, IMO, incest is deservedly illegal. The chief argument isn’t that it’s genetically dicey; it’s that sexual relations between near relatives are seldom harmless or completely consensual. I have less objection to siblings getting together who’ve been raised separately and don’t know they’re related, but they should check and see whether they’ve got any inherited conditions running in the family.

  Village Idiot (13), people who run those breeding programs don’t keep defective offspring.

  Antinous (21, 37), Chreesto has a real point there (36). I got a couple of lookitthat notes from people who thought you were speaking from homophobia.