“He is the love of my life,” 36-year-old Monica Mares of New Mexico tells the Daily Mail about her 19-year-old son, Caleb Peterson. “Nothing can come between us. Not courts, or jail, nothing. I have to be with him.”
Monica and her son are currently at the center of an incest scandal. The mother/son couple say they are “madly in love” and fighting with the court for their right to maintain a sexual relationship.
“If they lock me up for love then they lock me up,” Monica, a mother of nine, says. “There is no way anybody could pull us apart!”
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A little backstory: Monica had Caleb when she was just 16 years old and quickly put him up for adoption. Last Christmas, the two met for the first time. Soon after, Caleb moved into with his mother’s trailer. That’s when she says she started developing “crazy” feelings for him.
“I fell in love with him,” she explains. “At first I told him, ‘I’m sorry I don’t know how you are going to react to this. I’m your mom and you’re my son, but I’m falling in love with you’.”
She continues: “I said, ‘Would you ever date your mom?’ And he said: ‘would you ever date your son?’ And I said, ‘Honest truth, yes, I would’.”
When neighbors learned of the forbidden relationship, they alerted police. In February, the couple was charged with incest, a fourth-degree felony in New Mexico. They are both set to stand trial by jury next month. In the meantime, Monica is forbidden from having any contact with her other eight children or from seeing Peterson.
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Now, as to be expected, some right wingnuts are twisting Monica’s story into evidence against same-sex marriage.
“Another dispatch from Sodom,” Matt Walsh at The Blaze writes in a very long, very angry new op-ed titled If All Love Is Equal, This Incestuous Mother And Son Couple Should Be Celebrated.
Walsh calls the whole thing a “strangely familiar case.”
“They say they are in love,” he opines. “They say their love is just as loving as anyone else’s love. They say they aren’t hurting anybody. They say they’re consenting adults. They say this is none of the government’s business.”
“Gee,” he openly wonders, “where have we heard these rationales before? … If that was good enough for gay ‘marriage,’ why isn’t it good enough for a brother and sister or mother and son?”
He adds: “On what possible basis can we exclude poor Monica and Caleb if, on the strength of these very same arguments, we have declared gay ‘marriage’ an immutable human right endowed upon creation by God Himself?”
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To be clear, a heterosexual mother and her heterosexual son engaging in a heterosexual sexual relationship is absolutely nothing like gay marriage. Regardless, Walsh still supplies a snarky laundry list of reasons why supporters of marriage equality should also support Monica and Caleb.
Here’s a short summary:
1. The relationship is consensual.
Nobody denies that two adult men can indeed consent to ‘marry’ each other, but can we deny it in the case of Monica and Caleb? He’s 19, she’s 36. They have agency over their own bodies. Their reunion happened when the son was a legal adult. That means they both made their own choices, God help them. There was consent, without question.
2. Nobody is being hurt.
Yes, incestuous couples have a much higher risk of conceiving babies with birth defects, but contraception and abortion are also legal. … Besides, gay sexual relationships between men are physically harmful and are much more likely to lead to any number of diseases, not to mention the psychological effects manifested in sky high rates of depression, suicide, and drug abuse. If that doesn’t count as “hurting anyone,” then surely incestuous relationships cannot be said to qualify, either.
3. Love is love.
This is really the whole crux of the thing. It’s the reason why the Supreme Court decided to pretend that a right to gay “marriage” was embedded mysteriously into the Constitution. Love is love. Two people have right to love each other. All love is equal. All love is the same. Nobody’s love is better than anyone else’s, and so forth.
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Walsh goes on to write that anyone who says incest and gay marriage aren’t basically the exact same thing, based on the explanations he’s provided, is being “intellectually dishonest.” (Never mind that the very premise of his argument is intellectually dishonest… Or the fact that the whole marriage equality thing was officially settled by the Supreme Court over a year ago.)
“Progressives spent decades calling the slippery slope argument against gay ‘marriage’ a fallacy,” he carries on, “so they are now reluctant to admit that everything conservatives said in that regard was plainly true, and will soon come to fruition.”
He ends his op-ed with a battlecry for homophobes.
“This is why conservatives, what few still exist, cannot afford to compromise or give up ground,” he writes. “It may be too late to win the gay ‘marriage’ argument now — at least for a while — but we cannot give up making the argument, however fruitless it may seem.”
The whole thing–both Monica and Caleb’s relationship and Matt Walsh’s analysis of it–is totally bizarre and a little bit confusing. The one thing that is crystal clear, however, is Walsh’s obsession with gay people.
Seriously, what’s up with that?
DDstar1me
LMAO…..AAAAnnnndd the obsession with gay people continues. Every sub-culture from all corners of the globe finds a way to attack gay rights.
ingyaom
U’m not dating my mom, but if these two are really in love, as they say they are, it’s a shame the law is keeping them apart. If the law separated me from my boyfriend, I’d be pissed, too.
JAHarrell61
Personally, I don’t see the problem, so long as they are both consenting adults. I think it’s TWISTED, but unless they intend to have children together, I say let em be together if it makes them happy.
Heywood Jablowme
Since right-wingers are against abortion (and yes they DO lock up women for having them, not just the doctors), their “logic” says that any two-headed or bat-winged babies this mom gives birth to will HAVE to be protected!
seaguy
It is just plain creepy to me.
jag4313
Although creepy, it is understandable.
JessPH
So what exactly is this cretin’s argument against same sex marriage? That marriage cannot be redefined? Perhaps the imbecile forgot that many decades ago, marriage was only between two people of the same race. In fact, no less than his scripture defined marriage as between one man and many women.
robho3
I don’t even know what to say here.
FME2016
@JessPH: Yeah…In the USA, interracial marriage was such a huge issue, however, I doubt it was in other western countries. Americans used to use the Bible or g-d to justify their opposition to interracial marriage as Christianity was invented by Americans or something.