The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘My Sister Is Pregnant and We Don’t Know Which of My Brothers is the Father’

Posted on | September 23, 2014 | 146 Comments

The quoted sentence was spoken by a child on a school playground. Overheard by a teacher, this triggered an investigation that exposed a multigenerational horror story in rural Australia:

Police raided the Colt family home in rural south-western New South Wales in July 2012 after a teacher alerted authorities to a conversation overheard in the playground that detailed the incest. . . .
The raids found 38 adults and children living in filthy caravans and tin sheds without electricity, town water or any plumbing. They were the result of four generations from grandparents who were brother and sister. . . .
When the raid occurred Betty Colt was found sharing a marital bed with her brother Charlie and her children, same only as young as 10, were the result of sex between Ms Colt and her brother, father or another close male relative.
The five family groups comprised of sisters, Rhonda, 47, Martha, 33, and Betty Colt, 46, who slept every night with her brother, Charlie, and two of Betty’s daughters who each had children who proved to be from unions of related parents. . . .
Eight of the Colt children have parents who were either brother and sister, mother and son or father and daughter.
A further six have parents who were either aunt and nephew, uncle and niece, half siblings or grandparents and grandchild.
Interviews with the Colts revealed the family saga began back in New Zealand, in the first half of last century when June Colt was born to parents who were brother and sister.
June married Tim and in the 1970s the couple emigrated to Australia. . . .
Tim and June gave birth to four daughters and two sons.
Three of the daughters — Rhonda, 47, Betty, 46, and Martha, 33 — and at least one of the sons, Charlie, form the elder members of the family group in the NSW bush camp.
Betty had 13 children. . . .
Betty’s eldest child, Raylene, now aged 30, has a 13-year-old daughter, Kimberly. . . .
Testing identifies Kimberly’s father as either her half brother, an uncle or a grandfather.
Betty’s second oldest child, Tammy, now aged 27, has given birth to three daughters, one of whom died from a rare genetic disorder, and all of whom, she eventually admitted, were fathered by her closest brother, Derek, 25.
Betty’s younger sister, Martha Colt, 33, has five children, four of whom were fathered by her own father, Tim, or by her brother, and another who is the product of a union with a close relation.
It was the 10 youngest of Betty and Martha’s children, and Raylene’s daughter, Kimberly, 13, who ran wild in a sexual spree about the property. . . .
The children were sexually involved with each other and only one, the youngest, a five-year-old girl, had parents who weren’t related.

In case that’s not enough to give you nightmares, here’s a report detailing the squalid conditions in which this family lived.

When my brother Kirby (follow him on Twitter) called to tell me about this story, I was a bit impatient because his call interrupted my research for the “Sex Trouble” series on radical feminism.

At the time Kirby called, however, my work was somewhat stalled because of another odd story from Australia: In 2008, a 19-year-old Irish girl named Rosemary Nolan traveled to Brisbane, where she became the lesbian lover of 24-year-old Melissa Keevers. In 2009, via artificial insemination, Keevers became pregnant and gave birth to a girl named Lilly. In 2010, while being treated with a drug to stimulate ovulation, Keevers was inseminated again with sperm from the same donor and this time conceived quintuplets. In 2011, Keevers gave birth to two boys and three girls. In 2012, Nolan and Keevers split up.

Here’s what struck me about that story: It was celebrated with a worldwide publicity campaign by journalists who did not seem the least bit skeptical — or even curious — about glaring omissions of basic biographical information on Nolan and Keevers. Evidently, the Australian publication Woman’s Day had purchased exclusive rights to the story of this “miracle” — the first quintuplets ever born to a lesbian couple. The coverage by Woman’s Day (which seemed to be the only source for direct information in news accounts by other media outlets) emphasized that the odds against conceiving quintuplets without in vitro ferilization (IVF) were 60,000,000-to-1. However, the fact that Keevers was being treated with a drug to cause hyperovulation was omitted from the glowing stories about the lesbian couple’s “miracle” babies; so far as I could discover, it was only in a TV interview with Karl Stefanovic that this highly relevant detail was even mentioned.

As a journalist, the omission of this detail about Keevers being treated with an ovulation drug — a treatment that obviously was the secular cause of this alleged “miracle” — was striking, as was the apparent lack of journalistic curiosity about other details. If you are writing a human-interest feature about two lesbians, for example, wouldn’t you want to include their personal accounts of when and how they became aware of their same-sex orientation? You know, did they always feel “different” from other girls (as one sometimes hears in such narratives) or was this a surprising adult revelation, in which a woman  just happened to meet and fall in love with another woman (another standard lesbian narrative)?

If any reporter asked those questions about Nolan and Keevers, the answers never showed up in any of the coverage I could find online. And a lot of other stuff you’d expect to find in human-interest features was missing, too. Where did they go to school? What do their friends and siblings have to say about the lesbian couple and their “miracle”? Most of all, I wondered, how could the Irish teenager Nolan afford to travel to Australia for a backpacking excursion during which she reportedly met her lesbian lover Keevers by sheer coincidence?

Answer: We don’t know. There’s a hell of a lot we don’t know about that story, including how much Woman’s Day paid for the exclusive rights to the story, and I am dumbfounded by the credulity of journalists in Australia and Ireland who did not seem the least bit curious about the missing details. The Nolan-Keevers Miracle Quintuplet story was reported in much the same way an Orlando Chamber of Commerce spokesman might “report” about Disney World.

And after the lesbian miracle moms split up in 2012 — Nolan cited stress from her job as a police trainee — when the quintuplets were 2 years old, a Cone of Silence descended on the story. For more than a year, it seems, no journalist followed up on this story that once made worldwide headlines until, in August, Keevers gave an update to a TV station:

Ms Keevers met her current partner Nicole, a full-time student studying nutrition, 18 months ago through an online dating site.
With Nicole’s seven-year-old son now living with them, Ms Keevers now has seven children living under her roof.
Nicole has “as much responsibility for my children as I do” and loves them “like her own son”, Ms Keevers said.
“She feels like a mother to them.”

All this struck me as strange, but it’s one of those dead ends you sometimes encounter: You find a story that seems vaguely suspicious, but there is no way to check it out yourself. I have no contacts in Ireland or Australia, so unless other reporters share my skepticism, the mysterious gaps in the Nolan-Keevers Miracle Quintuplet story may never be filled in.

Such was the impasse I found myself in Monday, after hours spent trying to figure it out and write it up for the “Sex Trouble” series, when Kirby called to tell me about this horrifying tale of multigeneration incest in New South Wales, Australia.

“Depravity,” Kirby said. “That’s the only word I can think of.”

Yeah. We talked about it, how it was that this Colt family (“Colt” is a pseudonym the authorities are using to protect the identities of the children involved) could have descended into such total depravity. Once people lose sight of basic moral principles — when people start acting like all that “Thou shalt not” stuff from the Bible doesn’t really mean anything — you never know how far down the slippery slope they may eventually slide. Then one day an Australian school teacher overhears a kid say a sentence like, “My sister is pregnant and we don’t know which of my brothers is the father.”

Depravity is the only word that can describe what Australian officials uncovered in the Colt family. Their decades-long descent into total depravity began, we are told, when the incest taboo was ignored by a brother and sister who married and gave birth to June Colt, who then married her own brother Tim, and somehow this depravity continued generation after generation until 2012.

Anyway, I was kind of peeved when Kirby called me Monday, because his call interrupted me while I was trying to find the answers to questions about the Australian lesbian miracle moms, questions that other journalists apparently never bothered to ask. It’s always annoying to encounter a dead-end story like that, where you can’t get the answers you want, and I was already frustrated when Kirby interrupted to tell me about the Colt family — a distraction that has nothing to do with radical feminism and lesbian motherhood.

Nothing to do with it, I tell you. There is no relevance, no analogy, no correlation between these two stories — none at all.

What are you, some kind of hater?




 

 

Comments

146 Responses to “‘My Sister Is Pregnant and We Don’t Know Which of My Brothers is the Father’”

  1. DaTechGuy on DaRadio
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 10:13 am

    I’ve been reading my old testament, interesting that in the laws the sexual perversions in this story are cited are the reasons why God was driving the inhabitants out of the land given to Israel

  2. RS
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 10:21 am

    Of course, when sexual orientation, i.e. whatever gets one’s rocks off, becomes constitutionally protected from societal interference, this is where you wind up philosophically. People continue to dismiss such observations as “slippery slope” fallacies, but yet, cannot or will not draw the line themselves and propose a coherent philosophical basis for that line.

    And by the way, if any group is going to trot out the “born that way” defense it this clan in the Outback.

  3. Dana
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 10:24 am

    When a couple in West Virginia gets divorced, are they still brother and sister?

  4. robertstacymccain
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 10:27 am

    “… this is where you wind up philosophically. “

    Somebody should write a book about that.

  5. McGehee
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 10:41 am

    Yes, but they’re no longer in-laws.

  6. McGehee
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 10:44 am

    Jeez. That family tree doesn’t branch, it braids.

  7. RS
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 10:44 am

    Believe it or not, that book was required reading in a graduate level Philosophy course I took in 1985.

  8. kbiel
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 10:44 am

    This ties nicely in with my line of questioning for those who wish to redefine marriage: Since the purported reason for banning incestuous marriages is the progeny of such a union, should we allow brothers to marry each other or sisters to marry each other? If not, why not? If so, then how can you justify banning incestuous heterosexual marriage given that you argue that homosexual marriage should be forced upon the states via the 14th amendment?

  9. RS
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 10:49 am

    One finds similar family “trees” in places where there is a majority of Mormon fundamentalist polygamy, i.e. the Arizona Strip. See, e.g. Jon Krakauer’s Under The Banner Of Heaven. (Caveat: The Mormons of Salt Lake deny that there is something called “Mormon Fundamentalism.”)

  10. Colorado Alex
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 10:55 am

    The radical left and their libertarian enablers, when they think that they are safe to speak, will admit that they think incest and polygamy should be legalized.
    No doubt in ten years we’ll be told that cases like this are the result of “driving incest underground” and if we’d only loosen our morals one more time, the state could have intervened sooner.

  11. Dana
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 10:59 am

    Well, the Egyptian Pharoahs married their sisters, so maybe this family is simply trying to re-establish a noble and ancient tradition . . . .

  12. robertstacymccain
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:00 am

    Honestly, you should read what feminist psychologists have to say about lesbian motherhood in connection to the Oedipus complex. Having read very *deep* into this stuff, I find myself wondering (a) are they overlooking the syllogism involved in such premises, or (b) are they obliquely saying what I think they’re saying?

    It is profoundly disturbing, either way.

  13. robertstacymccain
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:01 am

    Except, instead of building timeless monuments, they’ll living in a shabby hovels.

  14. Dana
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:08 am

    OK, so they didn’t have indoor plumbing; neither did the pharoahs! They didn’t have electricity; neither did Rameses!

  15. Colorado Alex
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:10 am

    Most likely (b). There’s a reason that cults always end up with bizzare sex practices: it allows them to separate their followers from the rest of society and makes it easier to control them. The American left kept quiet about it, but the European left was much more explicit in its desire to sexualize children as a means of destroying monogamy and the influence of the family.

  16. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:22 am

    This is an extreme example, in terms of scale, but the truth is this sort of depravity happens on a small scale all the time (usually an older relative molesting nieces and nephews, but also children and siblings). Ask anyone who works at Child Protective Services how many of these cases come up. It is especially wide spread in Hawaii, Micronesia, and Alaska, but it happens in all states.

  17. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:24 am

    When does Games of Thrones come back on HBO again?

  18. Anamika Reddy
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:25 am

    Incest is the most universal taboo, so they say, but its practice is sufficiently widespread (by a wide margin) to constitute more than exceptions that prove the rule.

    I lived in India and I have lived in USA. I have had a lot of sex in USA and I have had a lot of sex in India. However, I do agree that it in general, it was far easier to have sex in USA than in India. In USA, you only needed a consenting adult partner, in most part of India, you needed many, many other things in addition to a willing adult partner. I think that situation is unfortunate and somewhat dysfunctional. I guess it is possible that some part of India might have greater probability on incest because other sexual relationships are socially and culturally blocked.

  19. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:25 am

    We have gone from the Von Trapp Family Singers to the Colt Incest Family. Brave New World Indeed.

  20. RS
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:35 am

    Congrats! You win today’s “Most Nonsensical, Irrelevant & Bizarre Internet Comment” Award. Please collect your winnings at the cashier’s kiosk on your way out.

  21. Anamika Reddy
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:41 am

    The blocking of fulfillment of normal healthy sexual impulses is a factor in most societies and certainly contributes to the prevalence of child abuse, and India may well have more blocks in place than most other societies. Against that, i had thought that, as in many Indian families, with the whole family all in one room or even bed, there might be an inhibitory factor which would mitigate abuse. But I could be so wrong.

    In the west, where fewer strictures are in place for normal sexual fulfillment, abuse is still rife, according to many studies. The most extensive study of child sexual abuse in Canada was conducted by the Committee on Sexual Offences Against Children and Youths (Badgley, 1988). Study findings indicated that, among adult Canadians, 53% of women and 31% of men were sexually abused when they were children. Many recover from this epidemic but enough don’t that the collective damage is catastrophic, and goes on perpetuating itself, via abuse victims becoming abusers themselves as adults.

  22. Anamika Reddy
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:44 am

    Why is it so bad in the sexually “free” west? Two things: One is the “repeater” phenomenon noted in my previous comment, the gift that goes on giving, and two is the substantial segment of the population that is far from free, in thrall consciously or otherwise to religiously inspired moral strictures.

    The “sexual revolution” has been on since the 60s but there is still a ways to go before real openness and understanding are widespread enough to make predation on children a thing of the past.

    Slowly, slowly . . .

  23. Squid Hunt
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:48 am

    Oh the horrible repression of not being able to have sex with your own sister! Evil puritanical upbringing, twist my soul!

  24. Anamika Reddy
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:50 am

    The Catholic church is the source of much of the repeaters. Institutionalized celibacy and morality and denial can be said to have been the very Genesis of child abuse. This can be seen in the North American First Nations people, as their history is so recent.
    Their cultures underwent a tremendous wrenching with the official kidnapping of their kids to “educate” them, ie break the links in the transmision of their culture by forcing them to attend White schools.Run in many cases by the priests and nuns of . . . guess who! There they got abused in all possible ways and grew up damaged in ways that were previously not possible and worse, passed their newly acquired dysfunctionality onto THEIR kids.

    More and more we are permitted to take action against organized and formerly protected pedophilia, but what they have set loose in society at large, fathers and uncles abusing children privately, will still have a long life.

  25. RKae
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 12:05 pm

    Ah! Don’t ya love it, though? That old “requiring people to behave themselves actually makes them crazy” routine!

  26. RKae
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 12:10 pm

    Man! Do I get tired of libertarians’ high and mighty phrases like “Don’t ever let anyone tell you what to do!”

    Hey, you know what, libertarians? The Colts “think for themselves,” “go their own way,” “march to their own drummer,” and “never let anyone tell them what to do.”

    It’s not oppression to have a culture with moral standards. It’s not tyranny to say people like the Colts are doing something that is rightly and wisely illegal.

  27. RKae
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 12:12 pm

    There was a Mormon encampment like that called Short Creek. My brother said, “They should call it Shallow Pool instead.”

    I laughed for about three days.

  28. RKae
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 12:15 pm

    Always attack Catholicism for “celibacy driving people crazy”… but never the Buddhists.

    Is Buddhism to hip for you to criticize?

  29. Anamika Reddy
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 12:36 pm

    Buddhism isn’t based on a foundation that sees sex as Original Sin.
    http://anamikareddy.wordpress.com/2014/07/07/low-self-esteem/

    However, Buddhist Monks in America had their fair share of sex scandals: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/us/21beliefs.html

    That NYT article apparently does not credit the American Buddhist community with the efforts —
    admittedly not huge but still substantial.

    Yes, there is a certain amount of ineffectual hand-wringing, but still more honesty i’d say than comparable scandals in Christianity.

    Oh well.

  30. Finrod Felagund
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 12:40 pm

    Per capita, public school teachers abuse children at ten times the rate of Catholic priests.

  31. Finrod Felagund
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 12:45 pm

    I haven’t seen even one libertarian, no matter how radically libertarian, argue in favor of repealing laws against incest. Polygamy, on the other hand, was common back in Old Testament times.

  32. Anamika Reddy
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 12:52 pm

    I suspect public school teachers/workers– if you I can quantify it–have more than 10 times the opportunity, time (5 days a week vs once every Sunday) and access, to abuse kids. Also, I would consider how many of these public school abusers were attending Church while abusing and/or attended Church growing up.

  33. Kirby McCain
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:19 pm

    I really didn’t call about the Colt family. I brought it up after relating to Stacy a story I read yesterday out of South Carolina. Fifteen children removed from a double wide and six or seven adults charged with neglect. When officers arrived children were swimming in a algae covered pool. One woman was living there with her ex husband and boyfriend while a man was living there with his girlfriend and ex girlfriend. One has to wonder what the children might have been exposed to in that home. Sure the Colt kids were screwing each other but they didn’t know what they were doing was wrong. When children are raised without the proper values there’s going to be hell to pay. All of these children were victims of their parent’s no rules, yolo lifestyle. Things like feminism and the celebration of deviant life are chipping away at the foundations of our civilization. Children, in a pornography saturated society, are getting mixed signals about right and wrong. When normal is oppressive we ain’t going nowhere good.

  34. DeadMessenger
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:31 pm

    All I can say is that at least it wasn’t Florida this time.*

    *Could easily have been, though.

  35. Bob Belvedere
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:32 pm

    Why, yes…yes, I am a hater, now that you mention it.

  36. Bob Belvedere
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:33 pm

    Tsk, tsk, Anamika, tsk, tsk….

  37. Kirby McCain
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:39 pm

    And there’s this story out of North Carolina several months ago. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/05/14/6-north-carolina-men-arrested-for-molesting-girl-over-decade/

  38. DeadMessenger
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:39 pm

    Easy to see the “legalization” circle that will lead from homosexuality to transexualism to polygamy to bestiality to pedophilia to incest.

    But yeah, when all this becomes ubiquitous and normalized – indeed, celebrated – what will the world be like then? (Tribulation, anyone?) I just hope I’m gone by then, one way or another, because I couldn’t stand to live in such a world. And it could all happen, easily, in less than a single generation. We’re almost there now, truth be told, as is the way with slippery slopes.

  39. ConstantineX1
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:39 pm

    Sick doesn’t even begin to describe this.

    But, thanks to the gays, incest will soon be legal (legislated by the federal courts). Soon fathers will be able to marry daughters, brothers marry sisters, sons marry moms, and of course the same sex versions as well. Once all standards for indecency are gone nothing will remain decent.

  40. Bob Belvedere
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:41 pm

    You’ve got to hand it to the Left for attempting to separate us all from Western Society.

    Personally, I’d like to hand each of them a primed grenade.

  41. DeadMessenger
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:51 pm

    I remember when that story broke. I was under the impression then that the victim was their sister, but the story at the link doesn’t make it sound like that. Unless the writer was trying to protect the victim in some fashion.

  42. Colorado Alex
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:51 pm

    I’ve had a few argue that “if they’re consenting adults, why should we care?”

  43. DeadMessenger
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:55 pm

    Agree 100%.

  44. Psalm1
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:55 pm

    Contrary to current societal “norms”, not all sexual impulses are normal, nor are they necessarily healthy. Biblical standards establish what ought to be society’s norms. Societies that hew the closest to these standards are the healthiest; those that stray are the most dysfunctional. Deterioration of standards, sexual and otherwise, is a mark of societal decay. Just look around you, Anamika Reddy, and see a society built on the sand of shifting moral standards, a society rotting from the inside. You must be so proud.

  45. DeadMessenger
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 1:59 pm

    And all will have polygamous relationships with the family pets.

  46. Jeanette Victoria
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 2:06 pm

    You need to go a little further they are trying to separate us from our humanity

  47. CrustyB
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 2:15 pm

    In fact, the rate of pedophilia in the Catholic church is the same as the general population. 81% of the victims are diddled by homosexuals, though, so the problem isn’t celibacy…

  48. M. Thompson
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 2:29 pm

    Reading this and watching “Criminal Minds” is a way to be creeped out.

  49. NeoWayland
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 2:32 pm

    *shrug*

    I assure you libertarians get tired of what conservatives say too.

  50. Michael Adams
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 2:38 pm

    No Christian Church, neither Catholic nor Protestant, believes that sex was the Original Sin. Believe what you want, screw whom you want, but DO NOT LIE!