newmexneon said:
They both have blood of the House of El, so I think that would qualify as incest.
Well, every single human being on Earth must share some ancestry with every other human being, if you go back enough generations. (Ten, a hundred, a thousand, whatevever.) That doesn't automatically make each new marriage an "incestuous" marriage.
If I've got this right, in the current "Reboot" version of Kara Zor-El's origin, she is the daughter of Zor-El, who was the brother of Jor-El, who was Superman's biological father. That makes Supergirl and Superman first cousins.
Superboy has half of Superman's DNA, and half of Lex Luthor's DNA. That makes him the genetic equivalent of Superman's son. As the "son" of her first cousin, Kon-El is Kara Zor-El's "first cousin once removed."
I have the
vague idea that in some parts of the world, including some of the United States, it is or previously has been against the rules to marry your own first cousin. (Or sometimes it was okay to marry a first cousin on one side of the family, but not on the other side of the family -- don't ask me why.) I have no idea whether there is any part of the USA, or anywhere else, that currently forbids you to marry your own first cousin once removed. It doesn't sound
very incestuous, at any rate.
As a side note: I recently read, in a book about life in medieval Europe, that there was a period in the Middle Ages when the Roman Catholic Church tried to enforce a rule against marrying any relative who was your
sixth cousin or anything closer! This created all sorts of problems. For one thing, most people
have no idea who their "sixth cousins" are, so they could easily marry a fifth or sixth cousin from another village without even realizing they were related at all! Suppose that ten or twenty years later they find out they are long-lost sixth cousins; now what?
Alternately, some people who basically wanted a "divorce" (called an "annulment") would dig out "proof" - real or forged! - that they were, in fact, long-lost fifth or sixth cousins. Therefore, by Church law, their marriage was incestuous. Therefore, by Church law, they had
never been "really married in the eyes of God" at all, whether they thought they were at the time or not! Eventually the Church abandoned the rule entirely in favor of a ban on marrying anybody who was a
third cousin or closer, if I have this right. I don't know how successful they were in enforcing that one, either. Nor do I know what the current rule is, according to the Roman Catholic Church.
