He hacks. He blogs.

I picked this up at Sully’s site. This is America?

The city council in Black Jack, Mo., has rejected a measure allowing unmarried couples with multiple children to live together. The mayor said those who fall into that category could soon face eviction. … Mayor Norman McCourt said starting Wednesday the city will begin trying to evict groups who do not fit into Black Jack’s definition of family.

So read on (emphasis mine):

The current ordinance prohibits more than three people from living together unless they are related by “blood, marriage or adoption.” The defeated measure would have changed the definition of a family to include unmarried couples with two or more children.

So essentially, if an unmarried couple with one child lives together, they can be a family. But if they add that second kid they must be kicked to the curb. Furthermore, the way the family definition reads, the restrictor here is that the parents of the children are not strictly blood related to each other. So one acceptable configuration would be a brother and sister living together with children they produced. I’m hoping there is an incest clause on the books.

In any case, I can probably see an argument for some limitations of the definition of a family for zoning purposes, though they’d need to be pretty broad. The most surprising thing is that the following fairly narrow definition was turned down by the zoning commission:

The town’s planning and zoning commission had earlier sought to change the law. Its proposal would have allowed “two unrelated individuals having a child or children related by blood, adoption or foster care relationship to both such individuals” to live together in a single-family dwelling.

I hope the transitive property of equality solves this for the Missourians. If a = b and b = c, then a = c. If a is blood related to b and b is blood related to c, then a is blood related to c. You may have scoffed at my incest example, yet it seems to take no more common sense to restrict incestual families than to include “transitive” families. But one has to ask, even under the new wording, what if one of the multiple children was not blood related to both parents?

Or maybe the new era of social engineering will simply stand in agreement with the era of social engineering from two generations ago - the era I’m guessing created this zoning rule.