Social Media Synergy Leads to Awkward Results

A couple of friends shared a story on Facebook yesterday, about attorney Ted Olsen schooling right-wing legal dilettante Tony Perkins on marriage equality  In short, Perkins tried to pull out the tired old standby argument that allowing same-sex marriage would open the floodgates to all kinds of marriages.

Watch lawyer destroy Tony Perkins on Fox after he says gay marriage leads to girls marrying dads. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins argued on Sunday that girls would be allowed to marry their biological fathers if the U.S. Supreme Court legalized... RAWSTORY.COM
At least this time Perkins had an actual news story to cite, regarding a father and daughter who say they plan on getting married after two years of dating  which began after twelve years of separation (when the woman was ages 4 through 16). There is plenty to unpack and analyze in that story, beginning with the fact that it certainly appears to be an outlier, followed by the fact that so far no one else seems to be seriously advocating for legal recognition of their marriage.

If they want legal recognition for their marriage, though, I say let them make their case, either in court or in front of one or more state legislatures. This is not the point I want to make in this post, though.

I just want to point out the awkward synergy created by Perkins’ analogy, as it pertains to one of Facebook’s algorithms. The two links above to the daughter-father story were from a list of three “Related Articles” on my Facebook feed, with the third one being a story about father-daughter purity balls.

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Purity balls are already just about the creepiest development in American culture, possibly ever, and yet they just managed to get even creepier.

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