Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Dueling Banjos and Misshapen Family Trees

Can you say consanguinity, boys and girls?

Far be it from me either to disparage or to have fun at the expense of the genetically weak among us, but I fear that the unesteemed U. S. Representative Paul Akin (R-Missouri, and would-be U.S. Senator) may have major Bigelow blood on both sides of his family tree. I was unsure as to the relationship other than marriage between his parents, but I knew his mother was a Bigelow prior to marriage, and Bigelow is,  not coincidentally, also his father's middle name. Further research shown that, unless online genealogical records are incorrect (and everyone knows that if it's on the Internet, it has to be correct) ,  Todd Akin's mother is his father's first-cousin-once-removed. Wheelock Bigelow, the father of [Todd Akin's mother]Nancy Perry Bigelow Akin , is a brother to Paul Bigelow, who is Paul Akin's [Todd's father's] maternal grandfather. http://bigelowsociety.com/rod8/pau84a71.htm Either the national press has grown very lazy all of a sudden or has equally abruptly grown a sense of tolerance.

I, however, possess no such sense of tolerance for Paul Akin. When Paul Akin made his infamous claim as to the improbability of conception as a result of rape, a statement  virtually unparalleled in terms of its simultaneous heinosity (which I looked up, and yes, it really is a word)  and stupidity, he opened himself up to public scrutiny.  This scrutiny is at least in part for the purpose of determination of precisely what might cause a person to make such a wildly ignorant public statement,  as inbreeding has been known to occasionally result in cognitive deficit, Paul Akin's family tree is fair game.

I'm not alleging that Paul Akin suffers from cognitive deficiency as a result of his biological parents' familial relationship to one another. I will allow each  reader to make his or her own conclusion in that regard.

1 comment: