Pretty Sharp Advice, Doctor...

Go ahead. Read the latest "advice" column for Dr. Mrs. It is teh suck. Let's start with the question itself, which is adorably inexact.

Reader RW writes in:

Hello Dr. Helen, Please help me. I want to find out if I can marry my second cousin. I am in love with my dad’s first cousin. She is my Dad’s mother’s sister’s daughter. We are the same age, please tell me if our children will be deformed. Can we marry?

Thanks,

RW

Ahem. Poor RW asks two extremely different questions -- the most important of which is not, "Can we marry?," but "Should we fuck?"

Let's see how the doc handles this:

Dear RW, First of all, I believe (and I am sure someone out there will correct me if I’m wrong) that rather than your second cousin, the woman you want to marry is your first cousin—once removed. Your great grandparents are her grandparents making her your first cousin—once removed. This cousin stuff is confusing but can be made easier by taking a look at this Wikipedia entry that illustrates the relationships between cousins and how one is to refer to them. In answer to your question, you can probably marry a first cousin, once removed—heck, you might be able to legally marry your first cousin—not removed—if you live in certain states. And in answer to your question about deformed children, you can read about the statistics of cousin marriage at cousincouples.com...

Nice! First, Dr. Mrs. plays the semantics game and then -- as if to prove her total and utter uselessness -- she refers the poor bastard to a couple of websites she may or may not have perused. The joys of wingnut welfare! She also pulls the awesome trick, in a column about cousin-fucking, to avoid mentioning Rudolph Giuliani.

"I hope this information helps you with whatever you decide," she writes.

I suspect it did not.