The Great Cousin Marriage Debate

Why Charles Amos is a National Treasure

British news is boring news. This is my worst, most boring opinion. When the London Metro drops a banger like “Devastating scenes in Cheltenham after someone drops entire KFC meal on the floor”, I scroll past it like a soulless pineapple. Still, cool things happen here sometimes, and the ongoing row over first cousin marriage is one of them.

Recently, Conservative MP Richard Holden called for a ban on first cousin marriage. (Currently, it’s illegal in the UK to marry your parent, child, or sibling — first cousin marriage is still legal, but may not be for much longer.)

In response, my friend

Charles Amos

took to Substack to defend the legality of first cousin marriage. His post went viral on X-formerly-Twitter (TL;DR: the internet does not like Charles Amos), after which he appeared on GB News to push the case for legal incest.

You can watch the showdown here. At every turn, Charles calmly flattens the presenters, lazily crushing their objections like paper cups. Being GB News hires, the hosts aren’t sharp enough to recognise this, and so carry smugly on as though nothing has happened. ‘That’s a strange argument’, they crow, as Charles lucidly differentiates between de dicto and de re senses of “future generations”.

Take a minute out of your day to watch this clip of Charles. Your reaction to the video is important, since it will determine whether or not you are an interesting person:

If Charles’s video gave you the ick — if you thought, “what a freak”, and shuddered — you probably wear sandals with socks and tap them to the tune of Sabrina Carpenter. If you gazed down his near infinitely thick lenses and thought, “I’d throw an egg at him” (someone did that recently), you probably watch Riverdale and like it. Your dating profile probably says “NO TORIES ❌🚫😤”. Your most controversial opinion is that pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza.

Interesting people, by contrast, intuitively recognise that Charles Amos — moustache and all — is a marvellous contribution to human diversity. If the Charles Amoses of the world disappeared, so would humanity’s soul.

You don’t have to agree with Charles on incest laws to see that he’s a national treasure. The reason Charles Amos is a national treasure is that he is one of the only people in British public life who will routinely defend — with absolute sincerity — unpopular views on the basis of first principles.

Bringing unabashedly philosophical arguments back into national debate is epistemically healthy, and Charles is singlehandedly fighting to normalise the practice. Moreover, along at least one dimension, Charles is remarkably virtuous. If you or I believed that first cousin marriage bans were unjust, we’d probably keep quiet, even in the face of a perceived injustice. Charles is not so cowardly.

I half agree, half disagree with Charles on first-cousin marriage laws. With Charles, I think the bog-standard argument for banning cousin marriage — the argument from genetic disorders — is a flop. (Why? Fear not. Explanation incoming.) Contra Charles, I think cousin marriage should probably still be banned in the UK.

I’m open to changing my mind, though, which is why I don’t like Riverdale.