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?




 

 

Category: Australia, Crime, Sex, Sex Trouble

Comments

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

  1. Quartermaster
    September 23rd, 2014 @ 11:57 pm

    Very few did. Of the patriarchs, Abraham Sarah and then Katurah after Sarah died. He also had concubines, but scripture doesn’t say how many. Jacob had two at the same time. Kings David and Solomon did, with David having 13, IIRC, and Solomon having 700 Wives and concubines.

    God warned Israel about “multiplying wives.” The turmoil in Jacob’s and David’s homes showed the dangers of it. Solomon ended up turning from God as a result his many foreign wives he acquired by marrying into foreign houses to cement friendly relations. God meant marriage to be companionate, and you can’t be such with more than one wife.

  2. Quartermaster
    September 24th, 2014 @ 12:05 am

    The moral climate of a country affects everyone, not just the people engaged in depravity. We are in the first stages of the final result of the sexual revolution, and all of us are being affected by it. We have a ways to go before our g?tterdämmerung, but it’s on the near horizon and the speed with which we approach it is increasing.

  3. el_polacko
    September 24th, 2014 @ 12:05 am

    so this group in rural australia which has been interbreeding for generations (not to mention all the other examples going back as far as biblical times) are all sliding down a “slippery slope” provided by non-discrimination against gay people in 2014 ??? did they all have time machines ?

  4. Quartermaster
    September 24th, 2014 @ 12:08 am

    At least NSW is.

  5. Wombat_socho
    September 24th, 2014 @ 1:31 am

    I’m thinking bad touch.

  6. G Joubert
    September 24th, 2014 @ 2:28 am

    QLD too.

  7. DeadMessenger
    September 24th, 2014 @ 2:39 am

    Those things are really hurtful, you guys! We can’t help it if our state was taken over by tourists, retirees, insane people, all Canadians who are bad drivers, and the kid on the porch in “Deliverance.”

  8. DeadMessenger
    September 24th, 2014 @ 2:42 am

    Here, let me quote RS, above:

    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.

  9. DeadMessenger
    September 24th, 2014 @ 2:56 am

    I’m not a hater. I’m just doing…ummm…due diligence. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

  10. DeadMessenger
    September 24th, 2014 @ 2:58 am

    I bet you’re right. I have cats, QM, and every time they see your avatar, they start looking pretty hungry. It’s just a couple of small steps from housecat to lion, you know. Or, at least, that’s what Darwin told me.

  11. DeadMessenger
    September 24th, 2014 @ 3:01 am

    Yeah, you’re right. There’s always something else for the list. We haven’t even touched on all the fetishes, yet. I liked it better when such people were just “pervs.” That was easier to remember.

  12. DeadMessenger
    September 24th, 2014 @ 3:02 am

    How do….you…know? heh.heh.heh.

  13. DeadMessenger
    September 24th, 2014 @ 3:03 am

    Think you hit the nail on the head, there.

  14. K-Bob
    September 24th, 2014 @ 3:22 am

    You just make up stuff and then believe it, right? Why not try some basic math?

  15. K-Bob
    September 24th, 2014 @ 3:23 am

    More like a Family Vine

  16. K-Bob
    September 24th, 2014 @ 3:27 am

    They must have ordered the Royal Family Starter Kit.

    I think this guy sells it online or something:

    https://simonstudio.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/prince_charles.jpg

  17. Zohydro
    September 24th, 2014 @ 6:36 am

    If it were Abos or Malaysians, this tale wouldn’t have even made the news…

  18. Paul H. Lemmen
    September 24th, 2014 @ 7:23 am

    You’re probably correct … Ohio is reminiscent of a creepy uncle.

  19. ChurchSox
    September 24th, 2014 @ 8:06 am

    Run a search on Russell Gene Simmons. I covered that story when it broke. The nightmares stopped about 10 years ago.

  20. M. Thompson
    September 24th, 2014 @ 8:17 am

    Still, you’d Know Too Much, and -Zip!- off to reeducation for you!

  21. B. Bending Rodriguez Sr.
    September 24th, 2014 @ 9:04 am

    Hell, the Mormon Church has denied for a long time that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. Until their own Family Search site showed all of his “wives” and additional writings and evidence came to light. Now they just don’t talk about it.

    Even after the church stopped practicing officially, there were still men who practiced with the blessing of the church.

    I know I have polygamist relatives going back a few generations. But there was no “braiding” I can see. I think that’s a more recent phenomena among polygamists. And when you see a whole group of them, you definitely think “inbreeders”.

    Polygamy is definitely a “fundamental” truth for the Mormon church. It’s called out in Mormon scripture. And it is still practiced, though it’s done via temple ordinances and only one living spouse. See Russell M. Nelson, who was “sealed” to one woman for “time and eternity”. This wife died years ago, and he hurried and was “sealed” to another woman for “time and eternity”. The first “sealing” was still intact. He believes he will be sealed to both of them in the afterlife.

    And before any Mormon readers complain, evidence to all of this is available. It’s not “anti”, it’s just evidence. See mormonthink.com

  22. Peejay70
    September 24th, 2014 @ 9:24 am

    Hey, who are we to judge? The incest was consensual, wasn’t it? (This is sarcasm in case you can’t recognize it anymore.)

  23. RS
    September 24th, 2014 @ 9:54 am

    What do you expect from someone whose theological knowledge is obtained from YouTube videos post by people with handles like “Atheism Totes Rocks, Dude.”

  24. Kimmy84
    September 24th, 2014 @ 10:38 am

    “The Catholic church is the source of much of the repeaters.”

    Evidence?

  25. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 24th, 2014 @ 11:46 am

    The “kid on the porch” was in Florida long before the tourists showed up.

  26. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 24th, 2014 @ 11:50 am

    This was not that Kirby. They are a group of inbred creeps living off the grid essentially in some trailers out in the bush. What is surprising is they even bothered to send their kids to public school at all. Thank God for that.

    It is disturbing it took so long for authorities to recognize something was terribly wrong with how these children were raised. But I would not classify it the same as I would the Rotherham sex abuse case.

  27. Dana
    September 24th, 2014 @ 12:02 pm

    In Kentucky, we don’t marry our brothers or sisters!

    Cousins, on the other hand, are fair game!

  28. NotAReaderYet
    September 24th, 2014 @ 12:04 pm

    Look at what the German Legal Ethics Board wants to legalize:
    http://www.thelocal.de/20140924/germanys-ethics-board-advises-depenalization-of-incest
    Apparently, it’s not just for Australian backwaters.

  29. FancyLad
    September 24th, 2014 @ 1:00 pm

    “Sexual desire is seen as a ‘consequence’ of Original Sin.”

    No it isn’t, not in any denomination, ever. Where are you getting this?
    How could someone raised, in what is still nominally a “Christian country”, be so theologically ignorant?

    Are you picking up your “Christian doctrine” from reddit or something?

  30. J Galt
    September 24th, 2014 @ 3:20 pm

    But . . . Didn’t Noah’s kids have to “do it?” This story sounds like 3 generations after The Flood, to me.

  31. Southern Air Pirate
    September 24th, 2014 @ 4:41 pm

    In the news today:
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11119062/Incest-a-fundamental-right-German-committee-says.html

  32. Kirby McCain
    September 24th, 2014 @ 5:27 pm

    I somewhat agree but I view Rotherham as a trophy taking behavior common to men from less civilized societies.

  33. SomethingWicked
    September 24th, 2014 @ 6:45 pm

    Betty reminds me of a joke…Mary married Larry and they had 12 kids, then Larry died. Then Mary married Harry and they had 12 kids and Mary died. At the funeral Harry’s brother Gary, was talking to Mary’s sister Terry and Terry said “well, at least they are finally together” . “who do you mean” asked Gary, “Mary and Larry?” No responded Terry, “HERE LEGS!”

  34. SomethingWicked
    September 24th, 2014 @ 6:46 pm

    HER LEGS not HERE…damn ruined it!

  35. Jeanette Victoria
    September 24th, 2014 @ 8:48 pm

    The Eastern Orthodox did not adopt Augustine’s view. The Orthodox Church does not believe that children are born guilty of Adam’s sin. What we do inherit is the tendency to sin.

  36. Quartermaster
    September 24th, 2014 @ 10:57 pm

    In general I agree. I’ve read some Orthodox writers that do accept Augustine’s view. They are a very small minority, however.

    The Orthodox view of Augustine is a confused mix bag. I’ve seen some Orthodox writers that damn him, righteously, I might add. Others call him “Blessed Augustine.” Frankly, he should be rejected completely as he imported gnostic and neoplatonistic tendencies into Christian theology and it has been magnified both by Calvinists and Roman Catholics.

  37. Daniel O'Brien
    September 25th, 2014 @ 10:19 pm

    “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”

  38. FancyLad
    September 26th, 2014 @ 12:55 pm

    Yeah, hate to break it to you but that’s in reference to what’s popularly known as the “the Curse” in ecumenical circles.
    Even though Catholics incorporate it into their doctrine of original sin, it’s still not what “original sin” actually means.

    For others reading here who may not realize it; the doctrine of “inheritable original sin” is largely a Roman Catholic doctrine. The Orthodox, Baptists, Copts, Syriacs, etcetera, have dissenting views on the nature of fallen man.

  39. theoldsargesays
    September 26th, 2014 @ 10:34 pm

    Whew!
    I was afraid that Florida was in the news again.

  40. theoldsargesays
    September 26th, 2014 @ 10:37 pm

    She’s picking up from the likes of Rachael Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell I’ll bet.

  41. theoldsargesays
    September 26th, 2014 @ 10:56 pm

    Thank God!

  42. theoldsargesays
    September 26th, 2014 @ 10:57 pm

    Hey!!!!

  43. theoldsargesays
    September 26th, 2014 @ 10:58 pm

    It’s the yankees!

  44. theoldsargesays
    September 26th, 2014 @ 11:01 pm

    Obtuse fool.

  45. theoldsargesays
    September 27th, 2014 @ 12:10 am

    Consensual polygamous relationships with family pets no doubt.
    You know…”We’re in love…. Arf-Arf”

  46. ‘My Hypothetical Daughter’ : The Other McCain
    September 29th, 2014 @ 11:07 am

    […] legalization of incest, a “reform” too late to benefit the multigenerational incestuous clan in Australia where uncle/brothers were habitually sodomizing their sister/nieces before the police finally raided the place. Meanwhile, in England, gangs of Pakistani pimps were […]