JEFF CHILDERS

Public health! Yesterday, the London Standard ran a story headlined, “NHS faces backlash over guidance on first-cousin marriages.” Last week, Britain’s government-run National Health Servcie (NHS) published new “guidance” promoting first cousin marriages (common among muslims), saying the long-taboo practice offers “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages.”

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Predictable and scorching-hot backlash properly ensued. As of this morning, it appears the NHS guidance has been hastily deleted from its website. Never mind!

Saturday’s C&C discussed the linguistic trickery behind the Orwellian term “public health.” Well, it only took one day to find the latest exhibit. Ask yourself: what business does the NHS have in promoting incestuous unions as “healthy marriages” in the name of public health? Setting aside the morality issue, first-cousin marriages aren’t healthy. It’s not even controversial. Rates of birth defects in incestuous unions are higher; we’ve always known that, and no one disputes it.

How are NHS termites even qualified to discuss marriage? Most NHS bureaucrats would rather push dogs in strollers, not babies. They think the world is overpopulated anyway and have no personal reproductive plans. (But I digress.)

Here, public health doesn’t actually mean health. And it’s not public, since it sneers at the sentiments of most of the public, who instinctively recoil at the grotesque idea of procreation among close relatives. But to the Marxists at the NHS, the lack of public support is the point. They seek to “destigmatize” (ignore the public) a minority-muslim practice. That’s politics, not health, and it’s not in the public interest, at least not in any way that word has even been defined.

This is not even an argument against first-cousin marriages. The practice is illegal in just over half (25) of U.S. states. The point is that this is what public health means. It’s anti-health and anti-public. It’s just a label that allows progressives to advance all their stupidest and wokest ideas, and we should never use the phrase in polite company.

Down with public health! Whatever it is