"Though you haven't heard of it, there are some fundamentalist churches that encourage dating and marrying nonbelievers and trying to convert them."

"It's called 'missionary dating' and it's a real thing."

"But as it stands only 3 people know you're the biological father of the boy, and while it may take all your will power, I think it should remain that way."

Says Prudie, noting that it's only a cousin marriage in the offing and not mentioning the thrilling line in the wedding ceremony — often used for drama in fiction — "Speak now or forever hold your peace." That line is there because of problems like the one raised by the advice seeker.  In fictional stories, it tends to be used to create tension over problems like — spoiler alert! — this:

"I feel like a complete oddity, but I am a male who hates sex."

"I feel dirty and gross during and after the process. When I’m with a partner I do my best to help satisfy their needs and desires, but I almost always have to rush to the shower afterward. Some times I simply can't even be touched without jerking away and having a panic attack. But I do love going on dates, making dinner together, snuggling while watching movies."

A question for Emily Yoffe.

In a similar vein: "The married couples who NEVER have sex but insist they're happy: Are they deluded - or just honest?"

"A few months ago, my husband uncovered an affair I was having with an old flame."

"He moved out and initiated divorce proceedings, but in the time since, I was able to convince him that I am truly repentant and to give our marriage another chance for the sake of our children. The problem I have now is that he says that if we are to stay married, he wants it to be an open marriage. I've tried to tell him that I've gotten that out of my system and I don't want to be with anybody other than him, but he says there just isn't any way he can ever trust me again, he doesn't feel an obligation to be faithful to me anymore, and at least this way we're being honest about it."

Letter to advice columnist "Prudie" from a woman who "just want[s] things to go back to how they used to be."

Who's more wrong, the wife or the husband? It's easy to say the wife, but the husband is also wrong, because the idea of open marriage should be founded on trust, not mistrust. He's punishing her, deliberately, not pursuing what he believes is a positive way of life. (I'm not recommending polyamory, but if you're doing it as an expression of hostility to your primary partner, you're not doing it the way the prominent proponents say you should. I know... should... why speak of shoulds in the realm of transgression? I do get that. But I'm not one of the promoters of polyamory. I'm just someone who's listened to my share of Dan Savage podcasts.)

"When my wife and I met in college, the attraction was immediate, and we quickly became inseparable."

"We had a number of things in common, we came from the same large metropolitan area, and we both wanted to return there after school, so everything was very natural between us. We married soon after graduation, moved back closer to our families, and had three children by the time we were 30. We were both born to lesbians, she to a couple, and me to a single woman."

You see where this is going? Blah blah blah... "I can't help but think 'This is my sister' every time I look at her now...."

Emily Yoffe asserts that I attacked her "as a tool of the racial and ethnic preference lobby."

She stands by her ethical advice to someone, but quite aside from my problem with that ethical advice, I'd like to say that it's unethical to portray what I said so inaccurately.

Here's the post I wrote, which isn't a general attack on her support for affirmative action. I was calling attention to the problem of incomplete honesty from those who seek to benefit from affirmative action and the way the school applying its policy has shared interests that cause it not to want to know about a false or misleading statement. This is the very issue that had been in the news with respect to Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. The schools want to be able to say that they have a good proportion of minority students, so they may not mind if an applicant claims, based on family lore, to be a member of a minority group.

Yoffe professed not to notice any harm to anyone in this interaction between a school and an applicant. That was, at best, willfully blind. As an ethicist, she ought to want to address the larger problem. And now, after linking to me as she did, she has an ethical obligation toward me that needs some attention.

Did President Obama violate the precepts of etiquette and display raging narcissism at the funeral of Daniel Inouye?

It's pretty much what everyone is saying, notably Emily Yoffe at Slate (where one ordinarily expects support for the Prez). When I encounter a controversy at this late stage of one-sidedness, my instinct is to develop the other side. Law school class is like that, you know. If there's a case that everyone just somehow knows is rightly decided, the way to have a discussion about it isn't to remark upon its obviousness, but to figure out how someone — someone intelligent, educated, and sane — could think it wasn't right. That's what I do.

Read Yoffe's description of Obama's eulogy, which dwells on Obama's own life, growing up in Hawaii, the state Inouye represented in the Senate. Obama talks about his family vacations, where they stayed in motels, and the motel rooms had TVs, and — "as the people must have been twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going" — the Watergate hearings were on TV, and so he saw Inouye, and because Inouye did not have that typical white person look, the young mixed-race Obama was inspired to imagine "what might be possible in my own life."

A funeral for a very old person — Inouye was 88 — is not an occasion for deep mourning or soothing profound shock. It can be an occasion to look back on the era, to indulge one's own personal connections to the time and the man who has passed on. And if the President of the United States speaks at the funeral, that in itself is a phenomenal honor for the deceased. The President should not read a typical eulogy, a conventional account of the dead man's achievements and wonderful personal traits. This is something different. And when the President is specifically noted for his oratory, something special is anticipated.

No one — I submit — was "twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going." They were rapt, experiencing the gift of a unique presentation, The Story of a Boy — that boy! — and how his individual history merged with The Story of America — A Story of Race. They knew, as they surrendered themselves into the hands of our storyteller-in-chief, that they would be cared for and rewarded. The threads would come together, the yarns would be knitted into a beautiful eulogy blanket, under which Daniel Inouye could be laid to rest and all would be comforted.

How dare you snatch that comfort away by counting the "I"s and "me"s in that speech?!

"I'm a 21-year-old female who is becoming increasingly fearful of aging."

"Since I was 18, I've tended to date men who were in their mid-20s to 30s which I figured that was about my attraction to the intelligence and maturity that comes with age. But I'm starting to realize that a large factor in my choice of mates is that I enjoy being cherished for my youth. I'm terrified of losing what I see as my most desirable trait. I am surrounded by beautiful women who are decades older than I am. But in my mind, youth precedes even physical attractiveness when it comes to sexual desirability. This sentiment has been echoed by the men I've dated. I've started exercising and using anti-aging skin products, but is there anything I can do to ease my apprehension?"

A letter to Dear Prudence.