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Andrew Bolt criticises Channel 9's 'Sixty Minutes' episode featuring John and Jenny Deaves, the father and daughter incest couple from South Australia and demonstrates that the station's cover-up and promotion of the issue reveals a deep problem in our society.
Kiss and tell just rubbish
Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt, April 11, 2008
EVERY country has moral cretins like John Deaves, who has had two children already by his daughter, Jenny. But it's how we react to such people that shows whether the rest of us are sick, too.
So to hear that John, 61, and Jenny, 39, from Kalangadoo, have lived together for eight years is no big deal.
But when a big-rating current affairs show of a respected TV station such as Channel 9 excuses, rewards and covers up for a man such as Deaves - well, that's suddenly a sign something in our culture has sure gone rotten.
Sixty Minutes reporter Peter Overton last Sunday interviewed John and Jenny, announcing that theirs was a relationship "many would say (is) immoral". Many would, but Overton wouldn't - or certainly not on air.
He and his team have picked up from our cultural vibe the new defence that's offered for much that was once - rightly or often not - called sinful.
It's the defence often given for everything from gay sex, gay marriage and euthanasia to abortion and prostitution and even drug taking and self-mutilation.
It's the one now given for Thomas Beatie, for example, the Oregon woman who cut off her breasts, took male hormones, grew a beard, married a woman and got pregnant, proudly showing her bump to Oprah Winfrey on television last week.
If consenting adults agree, and no one else is directly hurt, then whatever they do to themselves is fine. Right?
That's precisely the defence that Jenny Deaves gave on 60 Minutes: "John and I are in this relationship as consenting adults . . . We are not going out there to hurt anybody."
And it's this modish argument that John and Jenny needed Overton's willing help to concoct.
I say "concoct" because Overton hid, ignored or (perhaps accidentally) overlooked facts that showed Deaves might have groomed his daughter when she was still a child, and that the harm he's since caused with his incest might in fact have been deadly.
Let me quote from Overton's report - and contrast his gush with the facts.
Overton: (F)or years John and Jenny Deaves have been hiding a dark secret . . . Now they're about to reveal their deepest secret, one they've always tried to hide.
Secret? John came back from a holiday with Jenny to Dubbo in 2000 to announce to his then third wife, Dorothy, that he'd enjoyed with his daughter "the best sex he'd ever had".
Hide? The couple had already given an interview last month to Britain's Closer Online, which splashed with the headline: "I've had a baby with my dad".
Overton: On the surface, they appear to be the picture-perfect family.
They do? Only if you ignore that, "on the surface", this couple comprise a father and daughter who between them have four broken marriages, at least six children from four relationships, a huge age difference, a prison record for armed robbery and two convictions for incest. What, on the surface, would strike Overton as an imperfect family?
Overton: Jenny's story began when her parents split up. She was just a year old. She went on to marry and have two kids of her own and had little contact with her dad for almost three decades. At the age of 31, Jenny was meeting her dad for only the third time in her life.
Overton wants you to see this as a meeting of two adults with virtually no social history of father and daughter to keep them from having sex.
But John's third wife says Jenny had in fact met her father when she was 15 and stayed again with him at 16. She stayed a further three times before that holiday to Dubbo.
What difference does that make? It shows that John knew his daughter at an age when it should have been brilliantly clear to him that his role was that of a father, not a lover.
John had seen her as baby and adolescent, and before him at their meeting in 2000 stood not "a woman" but unmistakably his daughter.
Worse, it was a daughter who was vulnerable twice over. She'd already stayed with him as a teenager, a vulnerable age when most daughters badly want their father's love and are taught how to earn it. And now she was again seeking his love and reassurance because her marriage was crumbling.
She needed a father's help. Instead, he took her for sex.
Overton: But then they would break the greatest taboo of all - Jenny fell pregnant with their baby. Nine-month-old Celeste seems blissfully happy and perfectly healthy. Despite the odds. Children born to close-relative couplings are six times more likely to die at birth . . .
Overton let Deaves hammer home this partial truth's implied message:
John: The way I look at it, it's just like if I was married to Jennifer and she was not my biological daughter and we had a child . . . The child is not deformed. It had no mental difficulties. Quite a normal, healthy child.
The implied message is that this couple are happy with healthy children, and hurting no one. So butt out.
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