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Wow, there was a bit of a theme running this morning on Yahoo: incest.

If you read this blog, you know I check Dear Abby regularly. I find it on Yahoo while looking over the news there.

In the installment of Dear Abby that was posted today, GRIEVING IN MASSACHUSETTS wrote:

For 15 years I was a happily married homemaker with a wonderful husband. "Duncan" and I attended church together, frolicked through the fields, even exterminated rodents together. He was my best friend. It was bliss.

Last year I found out my father had had an affair with Duncan's mother the year I was born, which makes him my half-brother!

Well, yes, if Duncan's mother was not fooling around with anyone else. I guess the implication here is that she was unmarried.

The news was too much for my husband. He had a fatal heart attack not long after.

This is yet another reason not to have sex with anyone other than your spouse, and not to donate eggs or sperm. In this case, this woman's father and Duncan's mother were likely in the same social or professional circle, and so it wasn't a stretch for GRIEVING and Duncan to meet and fall in love and marry. But there was likely another aspect that was at work, something that happens when siblings or children grow up apart from their sibling or parent, and are later reunited. Some people label it "genetic sexual attraction". Duncan probably reminded her somewhat of her father - and for good reason. Duncan probably saw a bit of himself in her. And since they didn't grow up with the mindframe of "this is my sibling", they instead first looked at each other as a male and a female.

Unless there was some reason that both Duncan's mother and GRIEVING'S father were not around leading up to the wedding, it was evil on their part to compound their earlier sin by not warning their children that they might be (or likely were) half-siblings.

You've probably also heard (or will hear of) Mackenzie Phillips' claim involving incest. The Associated Press reported:

Former child star Mackenzie Phillips said Wednesday her father, John Phillips, who was a leader of the 1960s pop group the Mamas and the Papas, raped her when she was a teenager and that her sexual relationship with him later became what she termed "consensual."

Mackenzie Phillips writes in her new book, "High on Arrival," that she had sex with her father on the night before she was to get married in 1979 at age 19, according to People magazine.

I hope that this is really a way to sell more books, and not reality. Of course, her father isn't around to defend himself.

She told "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in an interview that aired Wednesday that her siblings "definitely have a problem with this."

Well of course they do! They are probably wondering why their dad didn't find them attractive enough to have sex with, too. Or maybe he did, and he was "cheating" on them with you.

Phillips, who starred on TV's "One Day at a Time," said the sexual relationship with her father lasted a decade and ended when she became pregnant and didn't know who had fathered the child. She had an abortion, which her father paid for, and "and I never let him touch me again."

Most likely, the child was not abnormal (beyond the parentage – drugs were likely more of a harm to the child than her grandfather being her father), and even if the child had some abnormalities, why kill an innocent baby created by consensual behavior? Why not adopt out? To hide it all from the media and your husband (if you were married at the time)?

Also, how can a husband compete with the bond his wife has with her father if it is also a sexual bond? What a rotten thing to do to a spouse. So "consensual" incest does have victims - children and spouses included.

Phillips said the sexual relationship, although she believes it became consensual, was "an abuse of power" and "a betrayal" on her father's part.

Yes, and that is one of the problems with it, although there are other consensual sexual relationships that are an abuse of power, too.

"I can't be the only one this has happened to," Phillips said. "Someone needs to put a face on consensual incest."

Why? Hey, if anyone is going to do it, I'd rather it be Angelina Jolie. (I am not accusing Jolie of actually being, as rumored, incestuous. But she is a hotter "face".)

Actually, people have already tried to put on a face on this. There have been features in the mainstream media on consensual incest, especially involving siblings who grew up apart. That one famous person claims to have done it likely isn't going to make a difference. And again, why do we want there to be a difference? Shouldn't this be one of those things a person keeps private? Or does she want to warn others of the perils of consensual incest?

Given the drugs and how the Phillips started (by her own claim), I don't know if this was really consensual. Certainly the writer to Dear Abby did not consent in that she did not know her husband was her half-brother, so that was definitely not consensual.

Will we see more famous people coming forward with tales like this?