Do you WATCH this show?

[trinityvixen]

Leave it to me to ignore the significance of a bunch of TV actors getting to speak at the UN in favor of goggling at this:

Incidentally, am I the only one still rooting for [Starbuck] and Captain Lee “Apollo” Adama to get together for more than just a quickie? Given that Lee’s father, the commander, already thinks of Kara as a daughter, their union would make family gatherings, like their equivalent of Thanksgiving, all the more pleasant.

Yes, I know that my family reunion was much more pleasant this year after I hooked up with--and brought as my date--my dead sister's ex-fiance. Oh, how we laughed!

SRSLY U GUYZ, THE SPACE INCEST HAS INFECTED EVERYBODY. Stop stop stop.


(And yes, I know it's not technically incest. However, our incest taboos are much more about avoiding sexual relations with people we've been socialized to accept as our family than it is simply about not fucking people genetically related to us. It's the socialization aspect--two people socialized to be siblings, say--being overturned that really gives people the squick.)

Comments

[avram]

Levirate marriage.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Interesting note on that link: Islamic custom seems to run 180-degrees the opposite way from Christianity, whereby the scripture prohibits brother-in-law marriage, but custom supports/enforces it. Christianity's major religious text treats such marriages as common but moved swiftly to prevent such unions as a matter of practice.

It's also interesting to note that such marriage practices tend to occur in those societies where women have few, if any, rights of person or property. In which case, it would seem that such arrangements are less about familial psychology and more about survival.

[avram]

Oh, yes, especially property.

Traditional Jewish inheritance law is weird, because a woman can inherit property as a daughter, but not as a wife. So if a married man dies, his sons get the property. If no sons, the daughters get it. If no kids at all, the man's father gets it; if the father's dead, the deceased's brothers get it; if they're dead, then their heirs.

So, yeah, levirate marriage in Judaism insures that a childless widow will have a child to inherit her husband's estate. The sin of Onan was that he was willing to fuck his brother's widow, but pulled out to keep from fathering a child on her, thus keeping himself in line to inherit his brother's estate. (Indirectly, because his father was still alive, but when his father died he'd have inherited either half or two-thirds of that estate.)